ORAL HISTORY of ROGER NICHOLAS RADFORD Interviewed

ORAL HISTORY OF ROGER NICHOLAS RADFORD

Interviewed by Sharon Zane

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 160

Biographical Profile 226

Index of Names and Buildings 227

List of SOM Projects 165

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PREFACE

My interviews with Skidmore Owings and Merrill architect Roger Radford took place at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, on three separate days – October 30, 2007; November 19, 2007 and January 4, 2008.

Mr. Radford was a welcoming, open and enthusiastic interviewee. He had a prodigious memory and was eager to show me drawings, diagrams and photos that related to the buildings and site plans he was describing.

In all three instances, I conducted a morning session. We then broke for lunch, and resumed for a somewhat shorter session in the afternoon. Both Mr. Radford and I have reviewed this transcript to add or correct missing details or to correct inaccurate spellings. This oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a downloadable version from the Chicago Architects Oral History Project web page, .

In addition to reading materials sent to me by SOM, I found relevant articles on the Internet, reviewed materials I had in my possession concerning Lincoln Center, and some pieces Mr. Radford himself provided. I also drew on my experience and background in architecture and urban planning, having interviewed over the course of nearly thirty years many prominent architects who have been involved in a wide variety of projects.

I have greatly appreciated the dedication of Susan Crapo, the transcriber for this and several other SOM interviews. To those at SOM who generously supported Radford's oral history, we are grateful, especially to Craig Hartman, who has been our liaison throughout this undertaking. Essential to processing this document in its many phases has been the cooperation of Donna Forrest and Michel Schwartz in the Copy Center at The Art Institute of Chicago, for which we are appreciative.

Sharon Zane April, 2008

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Childhood 2 Cambridge University 7 World War II 8 Student travels in Europe 19 Army years 23 Religious training and beliefs 25 Harvard University, Graduate School of Design 26 Begins employment at SOM 34 Works for Gordon Bunshaft 35 Organization of SOM New York office 37 Working relationship between Chicago and New York SOM offices 41 Connecticut General Life Insurance Company 43 Return to England for visa 48 Reynolds Metals Company Office Building 49 Idlewild Airport (John F. Kennedy Airport) 50 Challenges of designing airports 52 Chase Manhattan Bank 54 Davis Allen 44 Chase Manhattan Bank 56 Economic downturn early 1960s 57 John Hancock Building, New Orleans 57 Banque Lambert 59 Use of computers in SOM 59 John Hancock Building, Kansas City 61 Seagram's Building, New York City 63 Marriage and children 64 Guardian Life Insurance Company 66 Noxell Corporation, Noxzema Warehouse 67

Family life 68 University of Massachusetts, McGuirk Stadium 70 Radford's parents 72 Lincoln Center 74 Importance of sculpture in SOM buildings 84 Marine Midland Bank Building (140 Broadway) 86 United States Steel Building (One Liberty Plaza) 90 American Republic Insurance Company 92 American Can Company 96 Noxell Corporation, Noxzema Warehouse 103 Design development with Gordon Bunshaft 105 Federal Aviation Agency, National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center 106 Working for government clients 110 Importance of the client 112 New York Stock Exchange (unbuilt) 114 919 Third Avenue Building 117 Joint Banking Centre 119 No SOM "style" of building 123 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, projects 125 Temporary retirement 126 Canary Wharf 127 Engineering in-house versus use of outside engineers 132 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, projects 133 Retirement 139 Design distinctions among various SOM offices 140 Bunshaft's influence 142 Working for a large firm 144 Development of the "modern" in Western architecture 146 Successfully designed modern and contemporary buildings 148 Current architectural design 151

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Current SOM projects 153 Morality and politics in contemporary architecture 154 Philip Johnson 156

viii

Roger Radford

Zane: Okay, for the record: This is an interview with Roger Radford for the SOM Oral History. It’s October 30th, 2007; and we are in New Haven, Connecticut. And if you could say something for me, please. Just say hello.

Radford: Hello.

Zane: Perfect.

Radford: We’re actually in Hamden, Connecticut.

Zane: What did I say?

Radford: New Haven. But New Haven is five hundred yards down the road.

Zane: Hamden, H-A-M-D-E-N.

Radford: Correct.

Zane: And, Roger—I’ll call you Roger. I hope that’s okay.

Radford: Please.

Zane: I wanted to ask you, for the record, to state and spell your full name so the transcriber gets it correct.

Radford: Roger Nicholas Radford, R-O-G-E-R, N-I-C-H-O-L-A-S, Radford, R-A-D-F- O-R-D.

Zane: I’ll start, as I always do, and ask you to tell me please where and when you were born, and a little bit about your family background.

Radford: I was born in Nottingham, England on the 15th of December 1926. My father was an academic economist at the end; when I was born, he was in the middle of his career, but at the end, he was a professor of social administration in the University of Nottingham. My mother…

Zane: I’m curious: social administration. Was that a new discipline?

Radford: Well, as I said, he was an economist, and that was his profession. In the middle thirties, the move began—I used to explain to people that it was the academic underpinning of the welfare state. And people like [William] Beveridge were his friends and colleagues. My father, as a young man, had been Fabian. He went to LSE [London School of Economics], and then went into the First World War. Then he got this job. My mother was a mathematics teacher, but she died when I was four. And then, a couple of years later, my father married the widow of one of his wartime colleagues who had been killed beside him—that was the story. And she really became my real mother, you know, she brought me up.

Zane: From the time you were four?

Radford: From the time I was four or five, yes. And they lived in Nottingham until they retired to Cornwall. My father died in 1963, and my mother died in 1972, I think. So, now, they’re all gone.

Zane: And Nottingham is where, and known for what?

Radford: Well, it’s traditionally known for lace, and is the center of the lace industry in England. But more relevant to this conversation, one of the big industries there is Boots. And Boots used to be called Boots Cash Chemists. And the founders of Boots were Mr. Jesse Boot, who eventually became a peer as Lord Trent, and he was a big benefactor of the university. But, more interesting to us at the moment: in the thirties, Boots built a wonderful modern factory in Beeston, which is outside Nottingham, and, in fact, very near where we lived. And this was a building designed by Sir Owen Williams. It was a factory building for processing of pharmaceuticals, and it was made of poured concrete with cantilevers, and the outside was glass. It was finished just before the war.

Zane: It was like nothing you could see in Nottingham? Is that what you’re saying?

Radford: Well, it was a very important building. And ironically, it was finished just before the war, and because of blackouts, nearly the whole of the glass had to be painted out. [laughter] And I remember going to school in the train, and passing this building. Then, eventually, all the paint was removed. But the thing that’s interesting is, many years later, the Chicago office [of SOM] built a building for Boots, adjacent to this building. There were several buildings. [Sir] Owen Williams did this one, and it was called a Wets [Weightless Environment Test System] building, because in it, the processes to make all this stuff were done on several floors, and then they were moved by conveyors to a big central hall, where they were assembled and shipped out. They then built a dry building, also [designed] by Sir Owen Williams, but it was a much more conventional building. Now, the building that the office did was a straightforward office building. It was a very low building.

Zane: So these are things that you saw as a child?

Radford: Well, I saw the original building go up as a child. And we had friends, one of whom was the medical officer there, and I used to go to see the building when he was in it.

Zane: Back up a bit. You were born in 1926. There must have been some of the after-effects of World War I, but you were probably too young to really register any of those; but I’m thinking now, in particular, of the Depression, and what you saw of that?

Radford: Well, even at that age, one was conscious of that. Because my father had a salaried job, he was probably less affected than most. We were surrounded by industries. Quite near where we lived was Ericsson telephone, which now makes cell phones. They had a factory in England. And there was another company who made boilers, I think. And in these factories, the people worked from eight to twelve, and then from one to five. And they went there by bicycle. As the factories let out at one o’clock or twelve o’clock, the whole street would be flooded with bicycles. And I remember this as a child.

Zane: And your childhood?

Radford: Well, I went to school there. I went to Nottingham High School, which is an old grammar school founded in 1511. And I was there from 1937 to ’44.

Zane: Is that, in our parlance, a public school or a private school?

Radford: It’s a public school in English parlance, but it’s a day school. There were no boarders. In other words, it was a private school. There were fees, and it had a board of directors.

Zane: But it was a day school?

Radford: A day school. And from there, I got a scholarship to Cambridge to St. John’s College.

Zane: Right. But we’re going too fast. I want to know a little bit about your growing up, and what you were interested in, things which, you know, might obviously have led to [your later interests].

Radford: Okay. Well, running ahead a little: When I came to this country and met other architects and went to Harvard, and so forth, I realized that what draws people to architecture in this country is advertising and industrial design. What draws an Englishman to architecture is the parish church. And, at a very young age—I don’t know why my parents thought I might be interested—but, at a very young age, I was taken to a wonderful cathedral in the local area, where there was marvelous medieval sculpture. And I made drawings of this, you see. And, gradually, I became fascinated by architecture. And then, at one point, my father was on the board of some institution that was building a building, and he brought these plans for me to look at, and they were absolutely fascinating. And I began making drawings. I always said that I decided to become an architect on the day that Mussolini invaded Albania, but that turned out to be wrong. [laughter]

Zane: And why would that have been?

Radford: Well, I was in bed with some childhood disease, and this was on the news, but I must have mixed up the events, cause he invaded Albania a lot later. [laughter]

Zane: But you liked to draw from the time you were young?

Radford: Yes, but I don’t draw very well. I liked to draw these particular things. And then I drew mechanically. The war broke out when I was thirteen. And my interest was beginning to grow. People would give me books about

architecture. And I had an aunt who lived in Jamaica. And I wrote to her and asked her…

Zane: Jamaica, the island?

Radford: Jamaica, yes. I wrote to her and asked if she could find me a copy of a Frank Lloyd Wright book-I’ve forgotten the name of the book—but she never could. [laughter] This was because of the war, you see, that I couldn’t find the book in England.

Zane: And why, at that point, at the age of thirteen, were you interested in him and his work? How did you know about Frank Lloyd Wright?

Radford: I don’t know how I knew about him. But I guess I did. I guess I did. The funny thing is that before I went to Cambridge and began studying architecture professionally, I was a budding modern architect. You know, I knew about modern architecture. There were people in England who’d come from Germany. And the Boots factory was a fascinating thing to me.

Zane: You mean the way it looked?

Radford: Well, as a design. And I remember there were two books by a fellow called F.R.S. York, The Modern House and some other one. And I absorbed these books. And I knew about Le Corbusier. When I got to Cambridge, things were somewhat different. I’ll come to that.

Zane: What was the house you grew up in like? Was it old fashioned?

Radford: Oh, it was a brick house, built in 1870, something like that, three stories high, with about a quarter acre. Probably about the same size as this house, but a totally different construction, you know.

Zane: Well, had you had any other exposure [to modern architecture]? Did you go into London? I don’t know what was in London in the pre-war years.

Radford: Well I rarely went to London until after the war, really. I did go, though, because one of my grandmothers lived in the south, and I would go and see her. But it was a rare experience, yes.

Zane: It’s interesting how young people can be drawn to something, can find out about things that don’t seem available to anybody else.

Radford: Well, those things are there. The funny thing—running way ahead-when I first met [Gordon] Bunshaft, in one of the first early conversations I had with him, it turned out that he had been interested in architecture at the age of ten. And so was I. And there was a sort of bond there, which lasted a long time. I was always amused by that.

Zane: In high school, were you good at school? Were you good at math? What things did you like?

Radford: I was a very good scholar, let me put it that way. I got A’s in the final examinations. I studied the classics; I did Latin, and Greek, until eventually I gave up Greek, because I couldn’t see the relevance. The critical thing was, I was asked to write an original poem in Greek. Well, I’m not capable of writing a poem in English! I discussed this with my father, and he arranged that I would go into History [instead]. And there was a wonderful teacher called Bridge, whose brother was a composer. And Bridge had taught my brother, and he taught me, and within two years, he got me a scholarship to Cambridge in Medieval History. The system of schooling is so different. The specialization is much earlier. I also had lessons in English and French. But, at a certain point, one must concentrate, and much, much earlier.

Zane: Did you, as a young person, enjoy art?

Radford: Yes, but much less than I do now. There was a gallery, which I went to, but it wasn’t a dominant interest then. The thing that really dominated my early life at school was the war, of course. We had an officers’ training school, which I joined. And then, when I was sixteen, I joined what was called the Home Guard, which was a civil defense organization.

Zane: This was 1942, I guess. Right?

Radford: Yes. 1942. And I stayed in that until I went to Cambridge, but when the invasion took place [June 1944] our purpose was to deal with a possible counter-attack, because there were no regular soldiers in England. But, fortunately, that never happened.

Zane: Roger, for the record: geographically, Nottingham is located where in England?

Radford: It’s in the middle. It’s in the middle of England. It’s ninety miles from London, ninety miles from the east coast.

Zane: So therefore, to some degree, you were protected?

Radford: Yes. Between Nottingham and the coast there’s a flat area, which was converted into airfields. So any [enemy] bombers coming over would have had to pass over these airfields. We suffered three or four air raids, but very few, very few.

Zane: As a young person, was that a frightening thing for you?

Radford: Well, [during] the one serious air raid we all sat in the cellar, and these bombs fell around maybe a mile away. We were not in London, where the heavy bombing took place. I’m digressing.

Zane: That’s fine. That’s fine. I’m interested in the digressions. The war… Your father didn’t go?

Radford: No, no. He was too old. My brother was seven years older than I, and had been at Cambridge when the war started, in his first year. He went to Cambridge in 1938 and the war started in ’39, and he was immediately mobilized. After three years in England, he went to the Middle East and was captured at Tobruk almost immediately after he got there. He spent four years as a prisoner of war. That was a difficult time for me. I idolized this man, you know, and this was a worry. My father, of course, was devastated by the whole thing. But, it all turned out well in the end.

Zane: Did you know that he had been taken prisoner?

Radford: Yes, we knew. That was an interesting story. He was captured on June 20, 1942. It was really the last [big English] defeat. I came home one day, and my mother put her head out the window and said, “Come in inside.” She told me that he was missing. And that was the first notification [we had]. Then, about two weeks later, I was taking an important exam, when the school administrator came to me and whispered, “Your brother is safe.” So, I knew that he was a prisoner. And first he was in Italy; we heard that through the Red Cross and the Vatican, because the Vatican collected lists of these fellows and sent them to the Red Cross, who sent them to us. He was first in a place called Chieti, which is on the east coast of Italy. Then, as the Germans came into Italy, he was moved to Brunswick. And we had a system of letters: at any given time, he would receive fifty percent of our letters, and we would receive fifty percent of his. And then we sent him parcels. I’m not sure he found this so funny, but, as the war ended, I went to Cambridge and, for reasons I’ll get into later, I didn’t go into the Army till later. And when he came back, we spent our second year at Cambridge together, in the same college. [laughter] I thought that was marvelous. I think he… [laughter]

Zane: What was his name?

Radford: Richard. And he died last year.

Zane: But he was seven years older than you?

Radford: He was eighty-seven. Yes.

Zane: You’re eighty? I guess you are. You’re eighty-one, or almost eighty-one.

Radford: I’m eighty. Well I’ll be eighty-one soon.

Zane: December 15. That’s right.

Radford: Yes, I’ll be eighty-one in December.

Zane: Let’s get back to Cambridge: you got the scholarship, and so you didn’t think about going anywhere else?

Radford: No, no. You had to apply for the scholarship. And, in order to get the scholarship, I went up to Cambridge for three days, and we had an exam and various interviews. And I remember walking around in Cambridge and thinking: This is wonderful, I’d love to be in this place. I remember telephoning my parents and telling them this. And then, luckily for me, I got the scholarship.

Zane: In Medieval History.

Radford: In Medieval History. But, since I wanted to be an architect—and I already knew that—that had to be negotiated. And fortunately, the college agreed

that I could switch. In other words, the scholarship was really a test of ability, in a sense.

Zane: You had the freedom to change course.

Radford: Yes.

Zane: When did you decide you wanted to be an architect, and how do you think that came upon you?

Radford: Well, as I told you, when I was ten, reading and going to see these buildings, churches, and…

Zane: Well, did you really know what would go into being an architect at that point?

Radford: Yes. At one point—and this must have been during the war—my father took me down to the RIBA [Royal Institute of British Architects] in London. And we met a fellow who took me through the whole process of training and the different forms of examination, the subjects, and so forth. Then, when we left, my father said, “Well, do you want to do it?” And I said, “Sure.” [laughter] “Certainly.”

Zane: You entered Cambridge in what year?

Radford: 1944. September of ’44, or October of ’44.

Zane: When things were looking a little less bleak for the British?

Radford: Well, the invasion [of Europe] was on.

Zane: You know, I’ve asked this actually of Americans who entered college towards the middle or the end of the war: Cambridge must have been de- populated of men.

Radford: Yes. Oh, yes.

Zane: How did that affect you?

Radford: My class, our first year—I think there were ten people, some of whom were young people like me, some of whom had come back from the war for various reasons. Two people had been wounded. And then, the second year, there was a big influx, because the European war was over. And, in fact, by the time the university year began, the Japanese war was over too. These men flooded back.

Zane: But the next year, you must have had the influx of older men who had had life-changing experiences. Did it impact you at all?

Radford: Well, many of them became my friends. In fact, one thinks of these things differently. I had one friend—he couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than I was—who had driven the landing craft that took the commander of the commandoes on D-Day. He’s an architect; he did some architectural work for Getty, in England. Getty, you know, lived in England. And when Getty decided to establish this Herculaneum villa in California, he appointed my friend Stephen Garrett as his agent. And the reason I’m telling you this is, I only spoke to him two days ago, because he lives in Pacific Palisades, and I was afraid he might have been burned [in the huge forest fires of 2007]. But he wasn’t burned. And he was the first director of this museum for many, many years. Now he’s eighty-three, or so. So—and the whole thing moved forward, and now, of course there’s now this huge Getty Center, which is an outgrowth. It’s a fascinating story of what

happens to one’s friends. And I have other friends who did equally fascinating things. [laughter]

Zane: And probably some who didn’t?

Radford: And some who didn’t. Right. And some who didn’t. [laughter]

Zane: I hope they were happy. You were going to say—you could have entered the war at that point, right? Instead of going into university?

Radford: Yes. And I’m not sure that this has to go totally in the history.

Zane: Well, then…

Radford: No, no, I’ll tell you. My mother died of tuberculosis, and, when I was an infant, apparently I contracted some form of scarring on my chest. In 1944, when the army discovered this, they said I couldn’t serve in the army. I was somewhat distressed—and it seems funny now, but, you know, there was this war, my brother was a prisoner, and so on. However, within two years, I had another test, because of conscription, and they said, “Oh, you’re fine.” So I said, “Well, damn it. You know, here I am. The war’s over.” And they said, “Right. You can finish your studies.” So, I didn’t go in the army till 1951, which was a whole new experience, and, perhaps, interesting.

Zane: Insofar as what?

Radford: Well, the interesting thing is, in fact, I was viewed as an architect. I joined the Royal Engineers, because of potential allied skills. And then I was sent to Gibraltar. And, while I was in Gibraltar, an ammunition ship blew up. The harbor is backed by an enormous mountain, and the damage—the blast knocked down a lot of buildings, army buildings, and we had to rebuild

them. So, for a year, I worked with the chief engineer, and we became very good friends. I was really doing a civilian job.

Zane: They didn’t send you to continental Europe to rebuild?

Radford: No, no. One’s only in the army for two years, you see.

Zane: And that’s where you were?

Radford: And then it was all over.

Zane: Back to Cambridge: anything else in particular that’s interesting or relevant, would you say?

Radford: Oh, it’s a marvelous place.

Zane: You loved it?

Radford: Marvelous place. And the first three years—Cambridge is organized that after three years you get a degree. But I hadn’t finished training, so I had two more years before I got a diploma. But from the point of view of the School of Architecture, it was a continuous process, you see. One very interesting thing: the people who taught me—I was very fond of them, but they were not the most significant architects. One was a particularly good teacher, and as the years went by, I would work for his office in the vacations, and later, I worked for him for six months, sort of before I went in the army. And when I came out of the army I worked for another six months. And he and his family became very close friends, so I don’t want to belittle him. But, during the course of this, a man called Nikolaus Pevsner, whom you may know about, came to Cambridge as the Slade Professor. And I don’t know how this actually happened, but he and I became good friends. I would go to his lectures, and eventually he became a fellow of my

college. And when he left the lectures, we would walk back to the college— he lived in London, of course—and we would go to his room. And over the years, we became very close, and I corresponded with him until he died. When I went to England, I would talk to him, and write to him. He was a marvelous man. And he’s now somewhat degraded. But that will change.

Zane: But it’s interesting: you say that the teachers were not especially renowned, or accomplished, architects…

Radford: But they were very good teachers. Now, the design of the course: you had to have training in technical matters, like building and contracts. But there was the emphasis on the profession of architecture-designing a building-but you also had a very heavy component of architectural history. And the final year I had to do two theses. One was a thesis in design, and one was a thesis in architectural history.

Zane: And what did you choose?

Radford: Well, I did both. The thesis in design—the University of Nottingham at that point—the war was over—was beginning to expand. And so I chose…

Zane: Did England have an equivalent of the GI Bill here, where it offered, you know…

Radford: Yes, I think it did. Didn’t apply to me. But my brother and these returning veterans, they had help from the government.

Zane: So that would partially explain why the universities were expanding.

Radford: Not only that. Before the war, fewer Englishmen went to college than blacks in America. Very few. And there were only five or six universities. There were a number of university colleges, which Nottingham was at that time.

But after the war, there was a great explosion. And so I chose to do a thesis on expansion.

Zane: Of that university?

Radford: Of the university. The architectural history—now, I understand you’re an art historian, so you probably know what I’m going to talk about…

Zane: Well, not exactly. I’m an urban planner. Or I was.

Radford: I see. Well, Pevsner suggested—I said, “What am I going to do? What am I going to talk about?” He said, “Well, there’s an aspect of medieval gothic architecture which hasn’t been written about since 1898. And these are the chapter houses.” Do you know what a chapter house is? It’s a particular form, which is polygonal, either circular or octagonal. In one case it’s pentagonal. I ought to know—but I’ve forgotten—but there were something like fifteen, or twenty, of these things. So I did a thesis on that.

Zane: Well, that’s very interesting.

Radford: It was marvelous, marvelous fun. In fact, I remember writing to someone, saying, “This is the most exciting thing I’ve been doing. I love doing it.” Maybe I should have stayed in academic work! [laughter]

Zane: At Cambridge, in your architectural studies, what kind of interest was there in—or, you know, knowledge of what we might loosely refer to as modern architecture?

Radford: Well, that’s the thing: very little. We—the students, knew all—we didn’t know all about it—you know, we would buy Corbusier’s books, which were just being published in England at that point. But I don’t think we ever had a formal lecture on modern architecture, in that sense.

Zane: Or the Bauhaus, or any of that?

Radford: Or the Bauhaus. However, one of the instructors who came back from the war, David Roberts, who had also been an engineer in the army, talked to us about this. At Cambridge, you have a system of what is called supervision, where small numbers of people every week will spend an hour or two hours with a don-sometimes just one person, sometimes two or three. And this man talked to us about all this, and so we began to learn a great deal. But really, I don’t think I’d ever really heard of Mies [van der Rohe] until I went to Harvard. [laughter]

Zane: That’s interesting.

Radford: But [at Cambridge] one got a very thorough grounding professionally. That was the thing.

Zane: You mean in terms of skills?

Radford: In terms of skills. Yes.

Zane: Right. Of course.

Radford: In a way, those are the basics. That’s the basis.

Zane: But the kind of architecture that was being practiced in England at that time was what?

Radford: Well, there was a big modern movement in England. The London County Council had an architectural department who built very modern buildings, based on Corbusier. The Architectural Association, which my wife attended, was probably the best school of architecture in England…

Zane: What is that called?

Radford: It’s the Architectural Association. It’s in London. The Architectural Association is an association of architects, but it has a school of architecture, which has been there since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Zane: Something I didn’t know.

Radford: It’s the best school. I chose to go to Cambridge because I wanted a university education. Many of my colleagues, after the three years, would go on to the AA. I decided not to, because I was so fond of Cambridge. [laughter]

Zane: So you stayed and finished…?

Radford: I stayed and finished there. But the people who went there and were trained, they were modern architects. There was a certain amount of osmosis, because my friends and I would talk about it.

Zane: But you had some catching up to do?

Radford: I had some catching up to do. And the work I did for my instructor who taught me was—oh, you could best describe it as a sort of quasi-Swedish modern. But what he was doing—we had to build in England something like 400,000 houses. A third of the housing stock had either been destroyed or worn out, because there was no construction during the war. So there was a great deal of—that number may be wrong—but there was a great deal of municipal housing. His jobs were mainly in East Anglian villages; so, in a way, there was an early sense of contextualism, which is a word I’d never heard of at that point. [laughter] But these buildings were built of traditional materials, and there were tremendous restrictions. You could only use a certain amount of timber, because of the shortage of timber. You could only

use a certain amount of—there were restrictions of dimension, and size— very complicated. Very complicated.

Zane: Very interesting, though. Well, anything else about your time at Cambridge? Did you have a chance to travel at all before you graduated?

Radford: Yes. In 1947, a colleague of mine had received a travel scholarship from his college. And he and I shared it; I mean, I contributed something, and we went to France for three weeks. We went to Paris for a time, and then we went out to Nancy, in Lorraine. It’s a marvelous place. And we hitchhiked, which led to some complications.

Zane: And the reason you went to Nancy?

Radford: Well we went to Nancy because we knew about it. Stanislas Square, and— damn it, I can’t remember the name of the architect now [Emmanuel Here]. There’s an iron sculpture in the corner, [made by Jean Lamour] I can’t remember. My memory’s not that good. I think you can see it in Space, Time and Architecture.

Zane: I’ll find it. I’ll fill it in.

Radford: Then, the next year, 1948, with other colleagues, we went to Italy. Oh boy, the by-products of these things: I went with three people, one of whom was half-interested in architecture; the other two weren’t interested at all. And when we got to Florence, I said I wanted to stay three days longer, and they wanted to go to the beach. So we agreed that I would meet them in Pisa, or some place. The very next afternoon, Togliatti was shot; and there was a sort of lock-down. And I remember, since I was a British subject, I remember going to the British Consulate and saying, “What am I going to do?” And he said, “There’s nothing we can do to help. You’ve just got to wait it out.” But these crises would occur. It was very exciting. But, as a result, I spent three

marvelous days in Florence. But some funny things happened. The restaurants were closed. And, just before this happened, my colleagues and I had been to a concert in the Uffizi courtyard with a fellow named Roger Lubbock, who later became a publisher. I’d never met him before. As I was looking for a restaurant, I saw Lubbock in the street, and I said, “What are we going to do?” “Oh,” he said, “I know where to go.” So we went down a little street, knocked on a door, and there was a restaurant inside. [laughter]

Zane: And it was open?

Radford: And he lived there. He had contacts. And then, I suppose, the next time— well, that’s another story altogether. I, technically, finished at Cambridge in June of 1949. And then: what to do next? And two things happened. I was asked by a woman called [Olwen Kendall] Brogan—there was a historian called Denis Brogan, and his wife had a Welsh name. Anyway, Mrs. Brogan…

Zane: It was a Welsh name?

Radford: Yes.

Zane: Maybe I’ll be able to find it.

Radford: Mrs. Brogan was an archeologist. And she wanted someone to go to Sabratha, in North Africa, to make drawings of Roman—remove remains, you see. And I thought this might be interesting, for the summer. Then, one evening at dinner in the college, I sat next to a friend, and I told him this. “Oh,” he said, “You don’t want to do that.” And then he said, “Last summer, I went to a seminar in Salzburg, and you would love that.” Well, I found out a little more, and indeed I did go. Now, the Salzburg seminar is really a fascinating operation. It was started in 1947 by three students from Harvard, whose names at the moment I’ve forgotten. And they had the idea

that there should be some means, intellectually, of bringing together scholars and intellectuals from both sides of the war—the enemies—the people who’d been enemies for this time. So they bought, or acquired, a schloss in Salzburg, and set up this thing. And it was all done from Harvard. The instructors were from Harvard, and then they had so-called fellows from Western Europe, very few from the Eastern part, although later they came in. And I went to the third seminar. It was for six weeks every summer and I went to the third meeting. And there were some people who’d come from the eastern half of Europe. You know, Czechs and Poles, but very few, because that was cut off. I remember an Austrian became a good friend of mine, and, in fact, I still talk to him. He’s a professor of Art History in Vienna. Then I also had a German friend, who was an economist. And we once were walking through Salzburg, and he saw a German military Volkswagen, which was still painted with camouflage colors. And he said, “Goodness me.” He said, “In Berlin, that [a military vehicle] would not be possible.”

Zane: This seminar was not just for architects?

Radford: No, no, it wasn’t for architects at all. It wasn’t architects at all. Well, there were courses. I took a course in American art, where we learned about the Armory Show. I took a course in American Music, which I know nothing about, by a man called David Diamond. He did a lot of movie music. And I did a course in diplomatic history, and there were courses in literature.

Zane: So this was a…

Radford: It was an extension of education. No science. And the whole of the system— the institution still goes on. But it’s never had a scientific component. And maybe it should have, but it hasn’t. And what happened was that there was a senior staff of academics, professors, you know, in there. But there was then a series of TAs, who all came from Harvard. And they were my age,

and I became friends of several of them. And I was absolutely astonished by the breadth of their education as a whole. You know, I was a good architect, but very limited in other matters; and they were so broad. And I really thought, I’ve got to go to Harvard, as a result of this. At the time that I met them, I had no idea how I was going to get there. I didn’t know anything. You know, it was just a dream. But it was terribly important to me.

Zane: Well you had had somewhat of a liberal education at Cambridge, right?

Radford: Yes. But a lot of times, you see, there was so much concentration on the professional element. But I would go to other lectures; I would read other things. But there was no structured… For example, I’d never done a course in English literature, except for school. But anyway, these fellows were very impressive. Very impressive.

Zane: So, the Salzburg seminar was a real opportunity for you.

Radford: That was a tremendous thing. And, then, after that, I went down to Italy and met friends, and then came home. So, you asked about travel. I had a limited amount of travel: France and Italy.

Zane: I guess what I was wondering about is what you might have taken from what you saw during those trips?

[Tape 1: Side B] Radford: Oh yes. They were architectural trips. You know. Hundreds of things, marvelous things. Of course, there are all sorts of funny things which happened. We were only allowed to take out of England thirty pounds, which in those days, because of the exchange rate, was a hundred and twenty dollars; it didn’t go very far. And we had to tailor all these things. I don’t know how we did it, in retrospect.

Zane: Well, I would imagine that things like lodging was…

Radford: That’s why we hitchhiked.

Zane: Yes, right.

Radford: And things like that. You know. [laughter]

Zane: So, let’s see: that was the summer of ’49. And then you got out of Cambridge. You graduated—if that’s the correct term?

Radford: Right. Right.

Zane: In what year?

Radford: In 1949. Yes. When I came back from Salzburg, I went to work for my previous instructor, not really knowing what was going to happen. And then, I was summoned to the army, which, to be perfectly honest, I’d almost forgotten about. I’d almost forgotten about. Well, first they wanted me to go in the army in January. I had developed a strong objection to being in England in January, in the army, so I said, “Could it be postponed?” And they said, “We can postpone it until April.” So, into the army I went in April. And while I was in the army, the Korean War broke out. I probably didn’t hear about it for six weeks. [laughter] But that didn’t affect me, except that two of the people at cadet school went to Korea. But, as I say, I went to Gibraltar. And many people went to Germany. We were pushed all over the place. And that was for two years.

Zane: Well, wait a second. This shows you my lack of knowledge, but was Britain involved in the Korean War?

Radford: Oh yes. We had a division.

Zane: I didn’t realize that.

Radford: It was something like nine to one, but yes.

Zane: But you did have a division?

Radford: We had a division. And there was a battle with some infantrymen. I’ve forgotten what happened. And, of course, it was a difficult war, as everyone knows; muddy and primitive—a terrible war.

Zane: I only ever had two people I’ve interviewed cry. One was describing his experiences in the Korean War, and the other was describing his experiences in the Vietnam War.

Radford: Yes. Well, I think these people who… You know, I’m lucky; I didn’t go to a war. But you know, it’s terrible. Have you been watching—this is a total digression—have you been watching [the television series] “The War” [by Ken Burns]?

Zane: Yes.

Radford: It’s very moving.

Zane: Yes.

Radford: Very moving. Yes. When my brother died, I asked his daughter, “Did your father ever talk to you about his experience as a prisoner?” And she said, “No.” And she said, “From time to time, I would show him something I’d read, and he just ignored it.” These men didn’t want to talk about it. They blocked it out.

Zane: Well, what they say is that—and this is an interesting thing in oral history, because it’s come up over 9/11. This is just a digression, quickly. We had started this program at Columbia at the Oral History Office, to interview people about their 9/11 experiences. But then this whole issue came up: Do you re-traumatize people by having them…

Radford: Having them talk?

Zane: Do you want to have them remember in that way? Now, I think the real answer is that for some people, yes, and some people, no. But one has to be very careful. You don’t want to take the chance of doing that. And it’s the same thing with Holocaust survivors, many of whom never told their children anything—anything at all about what happened.

Radford: Anything. Right.

Zane: But now I forgot—I had—I wanted to ask you something else.

Radford: I’m afraid we got terribly digressed.

Zane: Oh, you know what I wanted to ask you? I didn’t ask you this before: growing up, did you have a religious education?

Radford: No.

Zane: Did you come from a religious family?

Radford: No. Both my parents were Methodists. My father came from a large family, and, as he told me, had had quite enough of chapel, as a child. My mother’s father was a Methodist minister in Jamaica—she was born in Jamaica—and he died when she was probably twelve or thirteen. But she became an agnostic. And I’ve always been an agnostic. And now I’m an atheist. So, in

fact, I never went into the chapel at my college—never went. I’ve been there since when I’ve visited. Because I didn’t think I should. There was a sort of feeling that: No, that’s not for me.

Zane: Okay.

Radford: I don’t know how that squares with my interest in church architecture. But I had a friend whose wife said he always described himself as an Architectural Christian. [laughter]

Zane: That’s good. I like that. Anyway, the army called you up, and you managed to postpone till April.

Radford: Yes. Then I did six months in England, and then I was commissioned in October and went out to Gibraltar, and I stayed there until April two years from the first April.

Zane: And you talked a little bit before about what you did. How did that impact what you thought about for future? What did it teach you?

Radford: Well, actually, I began to wonder whether I really was any good at being an architect.

Zane: Why?

Radford: Because…well, of course, the work I was doing in the army was construction. I mean, there was a certain amount of so-called design, and organizing things, but it was really construction. And, at the very end of my time there, I found an advertisement in the London paper, which was sent to us, that there was a fellowship at Harvard, for which I had the requisite qualifications.

Zane: Those being what?

Radford: Oh, you had to be under twenty-five, and single, in those days, and you had to have a degree-I think you had to have a degree from any English university. The fellowship was for either Harvard or Yale, you could choose. Anyway, I applied. And I had to get letters of recommendation. Pevsner was one; a fellow called Geoffrey Webb, my tutor at Cambridge, was another. Everyone was marvelous. They wrote all these letters. And then I received a letter from this institution, when I was in Gibraltar; and they asked me to be in London on a certain date. Well, it so happened that the date was two days after I would be back in London, out of the army. I merely wrote back and said I’d be delighted, that I’d be there. When I turned up at this interview, the chairman said, “I thought you were in Gibraltar.” And I said, “Well, I was until the day before yesterday.” “Oh,” he said. And then someone else said, “Mr. Radford, I think I know your father.” This was England, you see; and they were all academics; and this man, he did, indeed, know him. In fact, when I talked to my father, he knew him very well. Anyway, there were four of us who got fellowships. And I chose to go to Harvard, to do architecture. So I went to the GSD [Graduate School of Design, Harvard University]. I went to the GSD in 1952. I don’t know how much you know about the history of the GSD. There was an article in last month’s Harvard magazine all about the GSD, which was fascinating. What was the name of the president of Harvard? [James B.] Conant. He had hired a man called Dean Hudnut—Joseph Hudnut—in the 1930s. And Hudnut was a very interesting man. He was really a proto-modern architect. But what he really did was amalgamate the School of Landscape Art and Architecture into the School of Design. And he, then, hired [Walter] Gropius. And Gropius came in, and he—as you well know—he did not believe in history. [laughter] But he did believe in a strict interdisciplinary approach to design. Anyway, I thought it would be fun. I was put in the masters’ class, which was fifteen or sixteen people. However, just before I left England, I got a letter saying that Gropius had quit. And I said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear it, but I’m still coming

to Harvard.” And, as a result, we had four different instructors. The first was [I.M.] Pei, who was then a young man. Then we had a man called O’Neill Ford, who lived in Texas, and had been instrumental in what is called the lift slab method of construction.

Zane: The what?

Radford: The lift slab. You have a series of columns, you see, and they have jacks; and the floor is poured on the floor, using the previous floor as formwork; and then it is lifted. Lifted all the way up, like that. But Ford, that was what his fame was based on. But, he was a marvelous person. He came to Harvard; he lived in the graduate housing, because he didn’t have his family. He spent all day with us. And it was marvelous. Then we had a man from Denmark, Kay Fisker, who was professor at Copenhagen Architectural School. But the final teacher, who was fascinating to me, was a Swiss man called Alfred Roth. Now, Alfred Roth had written a book called Die Neue Architektur—The New Architecture, which had heavily influenced me at Cambridge. And, of course, it came out at the same time as Corbusier’s books were being printed. And he was a wonderful instructor. And he also was there alone, and so he spent a lot of time with us. So, that was great experience. And that’s when I suddenly found out all about all these characters, and the latent interest in what we called Modernism—which now may be called something else—began to emerge.

Zane: There was a lot of interest in that there.

Radford: Oh, total. Total. And, as I say, Gropius had quit. But he did—which was nice of him—invite all of us to his house. He was a rather stiff character, but that was very nice. He talked to us. He lectured, but he just wasn’t running the class. I think he had had some sort of disagreement [with GSD], but I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it was. Gropius had been the chairman, and I guess Hudnut returned as chairman for a time. But the dean

for that interim was a man called Hugh Stubbins. If I had to, I talked to him from time to time. He was a critic, and I remember him criticizing one of our designs.

Zane: And where did they have you living?

Radford: I lived in the Gropius building—you know, there’s a Gropius building there. What the hell is it called? [Harvard Graduate Center] I think I lived in Richards Hall—one of the halls. I liked that. That was wonderful. That was wonderful.

Zane: Did you have fun?

Radford: Oh, I met all sorts of people. I can hardly call him a close friend, but one of the people I occasionally had lunch with was [Zbigniew] Brzezinski. Another man was a fellow who eventually became a professor of economics in Georgia, Ted Boyden. Oh, great numbers of people. I would say three- quarters of the people in this Graduate Center were in the law school. But that was accidental.

Zane: But that really broadened your universe?

Radford: It was like the Salzburg experience again. You know, it was a great bonus. That’s where I watched Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. [laughter]

Zane: Where?

Radford: Sitting in the lounge of the Graduate Center.

Zane: You remember that.

Radford: Well, how can you forget, if you’ve ever heard it? [laughter]

Zane: Did you feel comfortable in the States? I mean, it was clearly a different environment.

Radford: Oh yes. Yes. I was so excited. You know, having had this sort of dream of going to Harvard, it was all wonderful. And I very much liked the people in the class, who became very good friends, many of whom I still send Christmas cards to.

Zane: You’ve skipped over something. You said that you had at some point a crisis about your own abilities.

Radford: Well, yes. I wasn’t quite sure, you know. And the funny thing…

Zane: And why was that?

Radford: I guess perhaps I didn’t know really what to do. You know, the army had been an interruption. And I wasn’t quite sure whether I was going to stay in Cambridge with this firm, or what I was going to do. It’s difficult to describe. Later, in fact, the thing that absolutely staggered me about going to SOM was that Bunshaft thought I would be a good designer. It never entered my head. I just thought I’d be an architect.

Zane: And the two aren’t the same?

Radford: Well, it’s a very good question. It’s a very good question. [laughter] I’m digressing terribly, but I…

Zane: No, you’re not. And this is fine.

Radford: I once was flying back from an office meeting in Texas, and the office had hired a new lawyer, and he and I were sitting in the plane, talking. We had a

strict division in the New York office between design and production, and, in a way, it was false, but it was terribly important. And he had learned all this at the meeting, and he said to me, “I don’t understand. Isn’t design the same as architecture?” So you’ve asked the same question.

Zane: But I think what you’re saying is that it’s not?

Radford: Well, it should be, really. It should be. But, you see, what Gordon [Bunshaft] produced was a philosophy of design. You could say that the contextualists have a philosophy—it’s different, that’s all. Or Neo-Georgians had a philosophy. What really happened is that his philosophy squared with my own to the extent that he could use me, and we worked together.

Zane: I guess there’s another piece of this, which is kind of an intangible thing; it’s like, you know, maybe the Mozart versus Salieri question. I mean, both could compose music, but…

Radford: Well, that’s a point…

Zane: You know. I don’t know. I mean it’s an interesting—it’s an interesting question. But, the Harvard experience re-invigorated your…

Radford: Completely. Completely. By the time I left—we had to do four projects, designing buildings. For the first one, four of us combined. For the second one, three of us combined. The third one: two of us; and the…

Zane: And then you had to do your own?

Radford: So the fourth one, Stubbins said to me, “Radford, you’ve got to do one on your own.” [laughter] I don’t know what he said to the others, but that’s what he said to me. But, by that time, I was off.

Zane: Anything about that one? Was it interesting?

Radford: Well yes. I had to design a museum on the banks of the Charles [River]. One of my colleagues was a Texan, and he kept talking about the sun, and how you oriented buildings away from the sun. And, of course, the light in a gallery is vital; so this building—I can’t remember anything about it—but the most important things were where the windows were, where the solid was, what light you got, and so forth. And Stubbins liked it, so that was fine.

Zane: In this program, you ended up with a Masters?

Radford: I ended up with a Masters, yes. Yes. But then I ran out of money, so Stubbins, as dean, had various gifts, and he was able to lend me two hundred dollars for, I think, nine months. And that enabled me to come to New York, and luckily I got a job at SOM, and started earning money.

Zane: But you’ll tell me about the… On two hundred dollars you could…

Radford: It was amazing. Well, the whole—the whole year at Harvard, I think the stipend was twenty-five hundred dollars. Forty thousand is what it is now.

Zane: No, it’s more.

Radford: More.

Zane: And while you were at Harvard you went into Boston, I assume?

Radford: Yes. I had met several—some people I’d met in Salzburg, but I had several friends. And no, I had a marvelous time socially there; met lots of people.

Zane: Did you travel, from there? Or not too much?

Radford: Yes. I had a friend in Texas, a woman whom I had met in England when her husband was on duty in the Air Force, and she came to England on vacation. And then she went back to the States. When she heard I was coming to Harvard, she—I was sitting in a lecture, and a person came and said, “There’s a telephone call for you.” Now, nowadays this would never happen. So I went out, and there was this woman; said, “You’ve got to come for Christmas.” So: how to get to Texas? Well it so happened, one of my friends lived in Dallas. So that was fine. So he and three others, we drove to Memphis, where his mother lived. And I flew from Memphis to Houston, and then I took a train from Houston back to Dallas. So, I was in Houston for Christmas in 1952, and that was fun.

Zane: Which just reminds me, when you came to Harvard on this fellowship, did they provide the transportation from England here?

Radford: No, that was done by the Fulbright Commission. You know what a Fulbright is? Fulbright, on the whole, was providing money for Americans to study; but there was also a reverse one, which really provided transportation. This money, in both cases, was locked money in different countries. And rather than repatriate it, the idea was to spend it in those countries, to the benefit… Anyway, so they paid my fare.

Zane: What did you do? Take a boat? Or did you fly?

Radford: I took a boat. Three boats. I went back, and came back again in boats; and then the next time I flew. But many years later, I took my son to England, and we were crossing in a plane, and we looked down, and there was the Queen Elizabeth, or the Queen Mary; and I told him that. And he said, “Hmm.” I said, “I came to America on that boat.” He said, “Why didn’t you fly?” And I said, “Well, we didn’t.” Soon as he got off the plane, he ran up to his mother and said, “Daddy came to this country in a boat!” [laughter] But that was—it was the cusp. If you were short of time—which, as a student,

you weren’t—you flew. And these boats were full of students, traveling both ways, you know. That was fun too.

Zane: So Roger, at what point did you decide that you were going to stay here and look for some work? I mean how did that happen?

Radford: Well, the fellowship had a time limit of two years. Maybe it was the visa that had the time limit. So, I thought, well, there’s an extra year. I’ll come and get a job. I knew about SOM. I didn’t know what the name was. I knew about Lever House. Lever House had been published in architectural magazines in England.

Zane: That was in 1952 that it was finished, right?

Radford: 1952. 1948 to ’52. So, when I came to New York, I thought I’d try and work for these people. And luckily, they were hiring. This—you know, the magnitude of the firm then—it was still a very large—it was a very large firm. And I was very lucky.

Zane: Lever House was interesting to you because…?

Radford: Well, because of its design. And then with the Harvard experience, and knowing all about these things, you know, that was the place to work.

Zane: What were a couple of the other desirable firms?

Radford: I did go and see Pei, who had taught me. Maybe—and he didn’t want to hire me. But he said, “Go to SOM, because they’ve just got a new job.” So, in the way of a foreign student, I thought he said, General Electric. Well, it turned out to be Connecticut General [Life Insurance Co.]. So when I got to the office—SOM—and they hired me, I said to the fellow who was hiring me, “I understand you have a new job for General Electric.” And he said, “No, no.

We don’t have a job for General Electric.” And he said, “However, we do have a new job.” And I was assigned to it. So I was very lucky. I was assigned immediately to a brand new job, with a slightly more experienced designer. She and I went to a couple of meetings in Hartford, where the owner was, and then, as it happens with these large offices, she was assigned to another job. So I was left on…

Zane: You just get moved around, and then there you were.

Radford: So I was left on my own. And so I, for a couple of weeks, I was given instruction in how to do a program, and so I programmed this project. And at the time, Bunshaft—this was in the summer—was abroad. And he came back. And the first time I had anything to do with him, I had to brief him on this program. Now—well, the opportunity—in retrospect, you know, I just did it.

Zane: You knew who he was, because he was…

Radford: Oh, I knew who he was. He was chief of design. And then—and all the people in the—“Oh, you’ve never met him. You know, he’s marvelous.” Or some didn’t like him, and so forth. But you know, having been in the army, it didn’t worry me talking to people I’d never met. And I could see that he gave me a very fair hearing, no question. And within a few days, I was leaving the office to go to lunch, and he was with me then and he said, “Where are you going to lunch?” And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Well, let’s go over here.” So we went to some sandwich shop, and we talked a little; and he asked me the sort of questions you’ve been asking me. But then, you know, it went on for a long, long time. We became very good friends.

Zane: And your initial impression of him?

Radford: Oh, he was marvelous. I assume you’d never met him. He was a great big bear of a man. Very direct. But extremely broadly educated. I’m very fond of the man. He has his detractors, as you will find from David Childs.

Zane: Well, I haven’t talked to David Childs yet, but I’ve talked to a lot of architects, and I’ve heard all kinds of things, pro and con.

Radford: Yes. I think, this poor man, there’s probably more anti than pro. But… [laughter]

Zane: But you got on with him.

Radford: Got on very well. And on this first project, I worked for him, for the rest of my time, until my visa expired; and then I had to go back to England. And a few months later, I came back. And I took the project to the point of a final model, which was presented to the owner. So the initial design…

Zane: Was yours.

Radford: No, no. It was his. It was his. But I was involved in it, and made drawings, and—I suppose I had some input. And then we got into the development. You know, it was approved, then we got into the development phase. When I came back, Natalie de Blois—who maybe somebody’s going to interview, who had been with the firm for some years, and been in Germany, where they were doing some buildings, came back, and she took over from there. But I was lucky, because I was then assigned to a building in Virginia.

Zane: We’ll get to that. So, when you went to work there, in the beginning, it was considered one of the larger architectural firm.

Radford: Oh yes.

Zane: Or the largest.

Radford: It was enormous. Yes. It was enormous.

Zane: I’m just curious… Maybe a little bit more just about—you said he [Bunshaft] was asking you questions. What ideas did you have in common? I mean what meshed so that you—he knew, and I suppose you felt comfortable with, you know, the idea that this would work?

Radford: Well, his philosophy was the philosophy which—in this jumbled way from a very young age, and then up and down, and in and out—I really was a modern architect. And he was a better modern architect. And in the discussions that we had, it was always a give and take. It was always a give and take. And continued to be, throughout the following years, you know. Sometimes it was more give than take, and sometimes…

Zane: And what was the atmosphere like at SOM when you first got there?

Radford: Well, we were in one floor of a building, 575 Madison Avenue. And the design room was very small. There were only twelve or fifteen people. And Bunshaft had a tiny little office in one corner. And then there was row of— they weren’t offices—a row of desks for the managers, the administrative people. And then beyond the elevator bank was a big room, a drafting room. And, as it so happens, at one point, that’s where my wife was working, as it happens.

Zane: Is that where you met? Is that how you met?

Radford: Yes. Yes. Then the office moved. Well, we moved several times. But, there was always this division between design and production. And it never—I saw the logic of it; but the Chicago office determined to abandon it. And they developed a studio system, whereby everybody does everything. And

frankly, in my opinion, the result is that no one does anything very well. Kevin Roche has always divided his work our way, and his partner [John] Dinkeloo was the ace production man. He was a marvelous man. And Kevin was the designer. That doesn’t mean you don’t know about production. It doesn’t mean that Dinkeloo didn’t know about design.

Zane: But they didn’t do the other.

Radford: And you concentrated. I’ve always thought it was a good idea.

Zane: And that’s what was happening in the New York office, is what you’re saying?

Radford: Yes. Yes. It may have been happening in Chicago in the early days. Later, when I was sent to Chicago for a time, it was not happening, and I didn’t enjoy that.

Zane: And who were the principals in the New York office at that time?

Radford: Well, there were four senior partners: Gordon [Bunshaft], a man called William Brown, a man called Robert Cutler, and Walter Severinghaus. Now, Brown and Cutler had not been in the war. I mean they were in the war, they hadn’t been in the services. Brown worked on the Oak Ridge Village, where the firm built a huge complex of buildings for Oak Ridge. It was a town, really.

Zane: And so Brown did that?

Radford: He was in charge of that. The other three were administrative people. Cutler spent his whole life building hospitals, to great effect. Severinghaus had been in the Air Force in the war, and Gordon has been in the engineers in France. They came back after the war. Then, there must have—I’m not sure

when I got there, there were any other partners in New York. There were about ten partners nationally. I guess that could be looked up.

Zane: Yes. Of course it can. And I’m more interested in whatever impressions of these people you’ve just mentioned you had, or any stories—anything like that.

Radford: Well, Brown was the administrative partner of this first building, for Connecticut General. And over the years, he was in charge of most of the projects I worked on—well, not most, many. But towards the end of my career there, I worked for Severinghaus on several projects. The most notable project from an interest point of view, which never happened, was for the New York Stock Exchange. The New York Stock Exchange, throughout its whole career, has been thinking of building a new building.

Zane: Don’t I know that.

Radford: Well it doesn’t need a new building. It just needs…

Zane: It needs some wiring.

Radford: …a much bigger computer. [laughter]

Zane: Right.

Radford: And in fact, I don’t know what’s happened now it’s gone public. I don’t know how the thing works. You still see pictures of these fellows at the opening bell on the television.

Zane: It’s all electronic now.

Radford: It’s all electronic. Yes. Are there still people running around the floor? You saw them. This was in 1965. And for the first two weeks, a colleague and I went down to the floor. I’ve never been so tired in my life.

Zane: Who was the head of it then? It was… Well, was it Bunny Lasker?

Radford: No. No. Gosh, what’s his name? [Keith Funston] I remember they had these different specialists, and odd lot people, and the general brokers, and they also had the two-dollar brokers, who were really a hang over from the twenties. They were brokers in their own right. Most of them were wealthy, because you had to be wealthy to buy a seat. But, even then, you could get the sense that the system was breaking down, because Merrill Lynch, for example, had fifteen members, and they all worked on orders from Merrill Lynch. [laughter] And there were—the idea that they would have independent—they did what they were told, of course. But it’s all changed.

Zane: Anyway, that’s a whole other thing.

Radford: And that’s a whole other thing.

Zane: Well…

Radford: What time is it? My watch is broken.

Zane: It’s ten to twelve. Do you want to go for ten more minutes?

Radford: Yes. My wife has arranged for lunch for us.

Zane: That’s so nice. That’s great. Would you like a break now?

Radford: No. Let’s go on a little longer.

Zane: All right. I’m interested in still anything more about the firm, the office, at the time you first joined.

Radford: One thing that fascinated me: at that time, one of the biggest jobs the firm was doing was building air bases in Okinawa and Morocco. And as a result, the government required us to have a time clock, an industrial time clock. And this didn’t worry me; it just was a fact of life. But there was deep resentment to this. And eventually, when those jobs were finished—as typical of a big organization—the time clock continued, and eventually, people began to realize there was no reason for this thing, so it was abandoned.

Zane: Took it out.

Radford: Great joy. [laughter]

Zane: And how much connection was there at that time between the Chicago office and the New York office?

Radford: Well, from my point of view, very little. Very little, with one rider, although this was later on. The Chicago office got the job to do the Air Force Academy, and that was done in Chicago. But it was an immense project. And at that time, the best model maker was in Jersey City; and he was a model maker whom we used for all our models. And I worked with this man a lot. So I was assigned to…

Zane: And his name was?

Radford: Conrad. Theodore Conrad. And there was a young fellow from Chicago, who was the project designer for this thing. And he would come from Chicago, and we would go and talk to Conrad. But I had to take it through day-to-day; and then he would come, and so forth. So I was involved for

several weeks in building this model of the Air Force Academy. That was the only connection at that point. But I think Gordon would go from time to time. Bill Hartmann, who ran the Chicago office, would come from time to time to New York. And I’m sure at the partner level, which I knew nothing about, there were regular meetings between them.

Zane: But it’s interesting that, you know, there wasn’t this firm-wide, you know, way of practicing, because you had…

Radford: No. No. At least I would say not. I would say not. Maybe the partners would say differently.

Zane: And when did that happen in Chicago, that they went to the…?

Radford: That’s—you know, I can’t really pin that. I think it must have been quite late.

Zane: It wasn’t that way when you first went to work there?

Radford: No. No. Well, the two offices worked together on the project in Jeddah, the building.

Zane: Which we’ll get to.

Radford: And I would go to Chicago a great deal.

Zane: And that’s when you noticed it?

Radford: No, it wasn’t then. And Faz Khan, who was the engineer, would come—and Gordon—and we all worked together on that. Jeddah was finished in 1980, I would say. And in 1985 or ’86, I was sent to Chicago for a year, to get ready

to go to England on a project. It was then that this system was in full tilt. And I don’t think it worked, but…

Zane: But back when you joined SOM…

Radford: It was not that way. I don’t know how they did it. I don’t know how they did it.

Zane: But the way it worked in New York, worked.

Radford: Oh, very much. Look at the buildings. Yes. Yes.

Zane: Maybe we could break here, and then we can start talking about the buildings.

Radford: Okay.

[Tape 2: Side A] [Resumption after lunch]

Zane: The first thing you were initially assigned to was this Connecticut General project?

Radford: Yes. Connecticut General.

Zane: And they needed what? And how did that go? Maybe this would be a good opportunity to really describe—because I guess this was your initial working with Gordon-how that all happened. Maybe a little detail on this particular project would be a good thing. You were junior designer on this project?

Radford: Right. Well, I think the most interesting thing—to me—at the beginning was that there was a very elaborate programming period. And this was an insurance company, with three thousand workers. They wanted to relocate from downtown Hartford to the country. And the reason was—really it was the parking problem in downtown Hartford. Although, of the three thousand workers, two thousand were new employees straight out of high school, many of them did not have cars. However—this is running forward—when the building was built, they all had cars. The building was surrounded by enormous parking lots, which, although they were designed, was in a way an unforeseen development. And so, for the first month or two, we were developing the program. The owner wanted alternative solutions. And we did, I think, six solutions, but only one was Gordon interested in. And the others—you know, the meeting would start, and we’d rush through the other five, and then would concentrate on the one. That was the concept of the three-story low building, with flexible space. And it was agreed that we would not discuss the appearance of the building until the whole thing had been developed. So, this was fascinating. You know, conventionally, an architect will produce a design; everyone knows what it’s going to look like. In fact, many times the design comes before anyone’s thought of what’s going to be in it. But, this was absolutely the reverse. It was the “form follows function” theory of design. We developed a module of six feet, which was a function of the desk size. The basic operation of the company was that they were writing insurance policies, literally. There would be two desks side-by-side: One person would start writing one paragraph, one sentence, and then he would send it to the next person, who would do the next sentence, and would then give it to the person behind him to check it. And this whole thing was done manually. Therefore, the individual workstation was quite small. It was a small desk, a chair, and sometimes a visitor’s chair, although not for everybody, because most people didn’t have visitors. And we decided that no one should be more than thirty feet from a window. They were in the country, and they should have natural light. This huge building was developed with holes in the

middle, courtyards. The actual management of the company involved negotiations with the outside world, and it was developed that they would have a separate wing, which was more of a conventional office building. And on the top floor of that was a boardroom. On the bottom floor of the building was a cafeteria, a medical department. And, oh, no, excuse me: the cafeteria was separate. The cafeteria was on the ground floor, but it was a separate building, sticking out. And the whole project was in a two hundred and eighty acre site, a marvelous landscape.

Zane: Beautiful.

Radford: And there was one absolutely phenomenal tree, which was preserved and became a focus, with a lake around it. There was a terrace on the south side, and Isamu Noguchi designed sculptures for this, and in fact, designed the courtyards. That’s the first time I met Noguchi. Gordon, I think, knew him from before. He did know him, because he had done a scheme for the north side of Lever House, which never was pursued, or never pursued then; I understand now that someone’s reconstructed it. So, Noguchi did the sculptures, some of which were not located on the terrace, but were put out in the field. What else can I say? We had to choose the materials. We chose a green glass for heat reduction. The whole building was non-fireproof, but sprinklered. So it was bare steel, which was covered in a combination of aluminum and stainless steel. The windows were surrounded by stainless steel. Their columns were covered in aluminum. The owner had been a sailor, and was absolutely fixated against having paint, having, as a young man, had to paint his boats. It was fascinating. Things had to be cost effective. If a non-painted surface cost less than twenty-five percent more than the painted surface, we could use it. One thing that was very interesting and new to me: a mock-up section was built of the building, which was about thirty-six feet by twenty feet, [with] the whole façade, and the space back to the core of the building. That was used to display, and get approval for various materials; and later, for the interior furniture. It was a

thing that I’d never heard of, although I understand that the firm had done it before.

Zane: I was going to ask you about the use of Noguchi, of an artist. Was that typical at the time?

Radford: It was typical of Gordon. Gordon had a big collection, and was very much determined to integrate art, and always tried, where he could, to get his owners to do that. And of course, in a case like the Chase building, which I was not involved in, where David Rockefeller was the client, who was also a collector, that was a marriage made in heaven. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it certainly worked here. And Fraser Wild, who was the chairman, was very much in favor of that.

Zane: So, this was the first big project you’d worked on this way, from beginning to end, ever.

Radford: Ever. Yes. Well, I worked halfway through. But yes. But then I saw the thing go through. Ironically—well maybe not ironically—the building was designed to be expanded. That was already thought about. And ten years later, to the day, we were asked to expand it; and I was, then, put on that as a designer. And essentially, there was no design; we just had to make it bigger. But in ten years, practically everything had changed. The steel was no longer made that way—had different standards of steel. The glass was no longer manufactured, although we did persuade the manufacturer to make a special run, I think. Even the granite, which was used for the base of the walls—very small pieces of granite—the quarry had been closed. So in ten years, these resources changed. And that happens all the time. It’s a very interesting experience.

Zane: So you have to find things that…

Radford: Well, this was a big enough thing that we could persuade people to re-open things. Or we had to find substitutes.

Zane: Interesting. That was something not anticipated.

Radford: Certainly not. Certainly not. In fact, they were such—you know, granite, steel, glass: one assumes they would always be available. But of course, isn’t true. And this was before double glass. This glass was thick, and had some glare resistance, not much heat resistance, but some glare resistance. One of the interesting things was the air-conditioning and the lighting. The ceiling was a series of baffles, two feet apart, and between the baffle would be a fluorescent tube. If you looked up at the ceiling that is what you saw. If you looked in echelon, you just saw a series of baffles. That meant that above that, you could have all the ducts, the fuses, and things like that.

Zane: It would all be…

Radford: They would be hidden, generally, but they were there. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Yale Art Gallery, by [Louis] Kahn. This had just been built at that time. Kahn had developed a triangular concrete grid, with all the air- conditioning up above. And I remember Gordon and I came up to look at this building, because this was a new idea. And what we did was unrelated, except that we were trying to integrate the lighting and the air-conditioning. In fact, one of the things that I always think I did a great deal in my career was to try and integrate the mechanical and the electrical, and the sprinklers and things. The architecture we were doing, the structure, in a way, was always the dominant—the dominant force. But these other engineering disciplines sometimes were not so well treated. But we tried to integrate the whole thing. The best building we did—well, we did two buildings which we were very proud of: one was in Des Moines, where we had a very good system of integration; and the other was a building for American Can, in Greenwich, where we tried to do the same thing.

Zane: So, from this first experience: anything? I mean obviously, since you and Gordon went on to work together for all those years, something worked. What?

Radford: Well, I guess he found that I was able to help him. Of course, other people did too. You know, he probably had a [work]load that was six or seven times the size [of what I did with him], so there were several of us working with him. So my story has just to do with me.

Zane: Yes, right.

Radford: But there were others. I was always very happy with the thing. And it seemed to work.

Zane: And from this, you took what? I mean it was, you said, your first big integrated project, so…

Radford: I made another one. The next one we did was for Reynolds Metals, in Virginia.

Zane: Right. But you had to go back, right?

Radford: Oh yes, I went back to England for a few months. I needed a new visa, yes.

Zane: But there was no question that you were coming back?

Radford: Yes. I had to get approval from the people who gave me the fellowship, that they would let me come back—which they did. Avery nice letter, saying I was doing important work, and they thought I should go.

Zane: So, theoretically, you were still on the fellowship?

Radford: Oh no. It was over. I think the purpose of the fellowship was that I would go back to England for a time. But I didn’t go back for any length of time until thirty years later.

Zane: Oh, you mean to work.

Radford: To work.

Zane: Were you married by this time?

Radford: No. We were married in 1956, so that was some time later.

Zane: All right. So you came back, and…

Radford: And then I was assigned to this job in Virginia. Reynolds. And there, the managing partner was a man called David Hughes, who was a very attractive fellow. And this was a building probably half the size of Connecticut General. We designed a square with one court in the middle. And the reason we chose that was there was a magnificent southern magnolia on the site. The site had no trees on it at all. Forty acres of site: this one tree. And we determined that we would build a twenty-foot square space in the basement, so that the tree roots [were not disturbed]. And the tree’s still there. The building had some interesting aspects. For northerners, Virginia is hot. So we developed the building so that the east and west walls—it was a glass building—the east and west walls had movable shutters, or fins, which were floor height, around fifteen feet high, two feet wide; and they were activated on a timer, so that in the morning on the east side, they were closed; and in the afternoon they were open; then the other way around. That still works.

Zane: And that served to control the…

Radford: It controlled the air-conditioning, and the comfort—you know, not only the air-conditioning, the comfort. But the north was fine. The south was not so good. We put an eyebrow on the south side that was never really enough. So on the south side, there were internal shutters, which people added.

Zane: Here’s a question, Roger. On the Connecticut General building, you were what was called a junior designer; and by this time you were a senior designer. And I’m just wondering what the difference is?

Radford: No, I think it was a question of salary.

Zane: Is that really all?

Radford: Well, I’m not even sure that those terms were used then. Now, these terms are used in the history of the firm. But I remember the project manager for Connecticut General was a man called Eddie Mathews, a wonderful man. And at one point, I said to him, “Well, I’m only the junior designer.” He said, “Ah, the hell with that junior stuff.” But on the Reynolds building, I worked directly for Gordon; there was no one else. There were other people, but they either worked for me, or they’d work in the production department.

Zane: So that was the difference.

Radford: That was the difference. Yes.

Zane: Yes?

Radford: Well, halfway through Reynolds, I was given another job simultaneously, working with Gordon, but peripherally with Gordon. Walt Severinghaus was in charge of it, for the United Airlines building at Idlewild Airport, as it

was then called [now John F. Kennedy International Airport]. The firm had been hired by the Port Authority to do a new airport. And they developed a huge long building, with two hundred and fifty gates.

Zane: Oh, for a whole airport. Aha.

Radford: And the airlines rejected it. They wanted their own buildings, which indeed they have, poor people! That, of course, over the years, turned out to be a terrible thing.

Zane: A mess. Yes.

Radford: Wally Harrison did a master plan. The road came in from what is now the Van Wyck Expressway, and swooped around this oval, and produced, therefore, a series of sites with a curving frontage. And here was the oval like this; and we were given—that’s badly drawn—we were given a site here.

Zane: This was the master plan once that first plan was rejected?

Radford: Oh, yes, the first plan was totally gone. But then Harrison was brought in to do this master plan. So our building had this curving site. The next door was American Airlines, also with a curving site. We built a curving building; American built a straight building. [laughter] But over here, TWA was given a site, which literally was like that. [laughter] So, one of the reasons for the shape of the TWA building shape is that that was its frontage. [laughter] And I remember, by this time—I can’t remember why Kevin and I had met-but by this time, Kevin [Roche] and I were once talking about it, talking about this building, and I said, “Well, our building is very different from yours.” And Kevin said, “In every way.” [laughter] It was a very complicated project, but wasn’t a particularly complicated building. And I’m not sure that it’s even there anymore. I was in Kennedy the other day,

when we went out to California, and I was totally lost. I hadn’t been to Kennedy for a long time. Practically every building has been changed, or destroyed, or added to, and so forth. And American has an enormous building now.

Zane: Now.

Radford: Yes. Very nice building. Big, strong building, anyway.

Zane: Well, the TWA building is still there.

Radford: Still there. Yes. But, in fact, when we came back—I think we went once on Jet Blue; but I have feeling when we returned on Jet Blue, we returned through the old TWA building. The building is exactly what it was. But one of the problems of all these, as you well know: the volumes of people are so enormous. You know we were designing buildings with little tiny concourses.

Zane: Right at the beginning of the jet age.

Radford: Yes. In fact, we were designing the fingers for propeller aircraft. And the jets came in, and…

Zane: And now they want to bring in a plane that holds eight hundred and fifty people.

Radford: That’s going to change all the runways, everything. You know, the maximum wingspan was two hundred and fifty feet. And even when we did Jeddah, which was many years later, it was still two hundred and fifty feet.

Zane: This is an interesting problem: when something is given to you that changes, and that doesn’t necessarily conform to the expected usage, or to the ultimate usage.

Radford: Well, that’s absolutely true. In fact, now, if you go to a place like Chicago O’Hare, the central building is shopping, and things like that. And all the activity takes place on the fingers. They’re called fingers, but they’re the whole building. Airports are very difficult, very difficult. Cesar Pelli just designed the new building in Washington for the airport, which I’ve never seen. And I once heard an interview with him; he began by saying, “You know, air travel is awful, and airports are awful, too. And our problem was to try and make it as little awful as we could for the people who are going to use it.” [laughter] But it’s absolutely true. Now, you don’t feel like that about a building for people who are going to work there, or be taught, or live, or whatever. They have a purpose. But…

Zane: In airports, the purpose is moving through, right?

Radford: Moving through.

Zane: Moving through, and out.

Radford: And you spend longer there than in the plane. [laughter]

Zane: Sometimes.

Radford: Sometimes.

Zane: See, but that must have been an interesting change.

Radford: Oh, it was an interesting project. It was an interesting project, yes. I’ve forgotten what happened after that. Have you got a list?

Zane: Oh yes. Here’s the list.

Radford: I’ve forgotten what happened after that.

Zane: Well, I can tell you.

Radford: Oh yes. Chase. These things take a long time. See, they took three or four years. Well: Chase Manhattan Bank. That was not the big Chase Manhattan Bank, but on the corner of Park Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street, I guess it is. They took two floors, maybe three, of a speculative office building, and we had to put the bank in there. And we had some slight influence on the façade. We got the general character of the windows, particularly on the floors. The mullions went all the way up the building, but the dimensions for them were worked out with the other architect. But the real excitement there, in a way, was the interiors, which were very carefully worked out, and in some ways, became a sort of pilot for the downtown building, which was being built at the same time. And Gordon was very much interested in furniture, and for his own apartment, had designed furniture for himself. And when…

Zane: This was where?

Radford: In Manhattan House. And when Connecticut General got to the stage of furniture, he hoped that he would be able to do the furniture. Fraser Wilde said to him once, he said, “You know, Gordon, I think I’m more attune with modern art than with modern furniture.” Which was interesting, at that point, which was in 1953, or thereabouts. And anyway, to cut a long story short: Wilde hired Florence Knoll, and the two firms worked together. By this time, I was not on the project, but I knew what was going on because my friends would talk about it. And Knoll had been designing furniture for some time, and to some degree—I don’t mean to be unkind, but there wasn’t

a great deal of innovation, because she was using furniture which she’d already designed. But when we got into Chase and Union Carbide—neither of which projects was I directly involved in—I was somewhat involved in Carbide—then Gordon got his way, and the furniture for those buildings was designed by our office. And there was man called Davis Allen, who was at Brown, and then he went to Yale; and he was man of incredible taste, in addition to being a very adept designer. And he and Gordon worked together for many years.

Zane: He did the interiors?

Radford: He developed the interiors. Now, there were other people who worked on the interiors. For example, in Union Carbide, a fellow called Jack Dunbar did that. He and Allen were friends, and they worked together. But, of course, an interior project is largely organization. You choose a chair, you choose a desk, and you choose other items; then you’ve got to put them all together. So, the job of interior design in a building of that sort is really one of planning and organization.

Zane: But you’re saying that Gordon was also interested in the design of the things themselves.

Radford: Of the piece, yes, very much so. Very much so.

Zane: But that’s not what Davis Allen did?

Radford: Davis, well, he would do both. In fact, at the end of his career, he designed a chair, which is not unlike a chair with sticks.

Zane: Spindles? Spindle chair?

Radford: No. There’s a word—we have a Danish chair downstairs, not by Davis; but it’s a chair where you have a back, and you have little posts like this; and there’s a name for it, and I can’t remember what it is. He designed one with arms, one without arms, and very subtle differences. And they’re beautiful chairs. I’m not an expert on furniture, but the whole business of furniture is the subtleties between various things.

Zane: You mean between the…

Radford: Well, the same chair with a slight modification.

Zane: So, what was your assessment of these offices at Chase?

Radford: Well, it was great fun. This building was intended to make sure that Chase still had an uptown headquarters. The whole business of Chase staying downtown, at that time, the whole movement was to abandon Lower Manhattan, and move up to Midtown. And the Rockefellers, both David and Nelson, were determined to stop that. And the big Chase was the first major building to do that. And it worked. It anchored… But they were very nervous. And at that time, Citibank built a building uptown. So they determined to have this uptown headquarters. The ground floor was for executive banking. It had a lobby and a series of offices for bankers. Then you went up an escalator to the ordinary banking, where you and I might go and cash a check. But on the top floor was a whole suite, an office for the chairman, the president, the vice-chairman, and other offices, a boardroom, a dining room, and marvelous works of art.

Zane: Yes, indeed.

Radford: And you’ve seen this building?

Zane: Oh, yes.

Radford: The fourth floor? And there’s a wonderful picture by Sam Francis. I hadn’t realized Sam Francis had died. When we were in Pasadena recently, there’s a wonderful work of his in the Norton Simon Museum. Where do we go next?

Zane: To the John Hancock Building. But, finish what you were going to say about Chase.

Radford: There’s not much more to say. From my point of view, there’s not much more to say.

Zane: You said before, you would work on more than one thing at one time.

Radford: In fact, about this point, the huge buildings were coming to an end. Union Carbide, which was two million—I mean all these buildings were in millions of square feet—Chase, Union Carbide, Connecticut General. And we got into a period where we were going to do small buildings.

Zane: And why was that?

Radford: The economy changed.

Zane: This is what, the early sixties?

Radford: Well, let’s see. What’s Union… What’s Hancock? Hancock. 1961. Well, we probably began working on it in ’60. And John Hancock, which, as you know, is an insurance company in Boston, had decided to build a series of buildings. And the first one they did was in San Francisco, which Chuck Bassett did. It’s really a cube on some sort of arcaded bottom, and the cube has punched holes—very unlike anything the office was doing—but still a modern building, and a very elegant building. They then decided to build a

building in New Orleans. The purpose of these buildings—they had a local office there, but it was really…

Zane: Advertisement.

Radford: …sort of advertising. Yes. So we were asked to do this building in New Orleans, and it was a fascinating building. We had a pre-cast concrete grid, supported on twelve columns… [drawing it]

Zane: I think you need my pen.

Radford: This is wearing out! Sorry. And this was five feet in front of the glass. We made studies that the sun never hit the glass. And this was what? Six stories high maybe. It also had a courtyard with Noguchi sculpture. At the back of the courtyard we had some very elegant planting, I’ve forgotten the name of the tree now. And this whole building was built on a podium, which was a garage underneath. And because of the conditions in New Orleans, this garage had a steel door, which came up in the event of flooding. I’ve often wondered what happened to it in the recent events.

Zane: The question at the tip of my tongue.

Radford: But that end of New Orleans was not as badly hit as this other side.

Zane: So it would just shut it off. It was sort of like in a ship, if you’re trying to…

Radford: Exactly. Yes. And of course, the whole city was pumped. We had pumps in the building. The engineer for the building was a man called Paul Weidlinger. And this was the beginning of relationship between Bunshaft and Weidlinger. Oh, excuse me. He had started on the Brussels Bank. The firm was hired to do the Banque Lambert in Brussels.

Zane: Lambert.

Radford: Lambert was a Rothschild. And the original Banque Lambert—I think it’s burned down—the family lived above the bank, and they wanted to repeat that. So this is a five-story building with a banking hall in the bottom, and offices up above, and then the top is what Gordon always described as a horizontal palace. And Weidlinger was the engineer for it. And it had a more sophisticated system of structure than New Orleans. There were a series of crosses, which held up each floor. And these crosses were—really, they were works of sculpture: beautifully designed, very dense concrete, polished, and between each cross was a stainless steel connector, which was about this big, two pieces fitting together. And Weidlinger was involved in that. When we got to New Orleans, we had a very small number of major columns, and the reason for that was that the foundations were so huge, that essentially the whole area of the building under the ground was individual foundations under these columns.

Zane: And that had to be because of…

Radford: Because of the lousy ground. And I remember Weidlinger saying to me, he said, “You know, we could not have done this building without computers.” And this was the beginning of computerized engineering. Very interesting. In the sixties. And before that, I’m sure people used slide rules, and calculators, and things. But the choices which were offered, in fact, the series of the calculations were so complex. And I remember him saying that. Of course now, everything’s done that way.

Zane: At that time, you were not using computers.

Radford: No.

Zane: No. But probably very few…

Radford: No. In fact… No. Other than this [pointing to his pc], I’ve never used a computer. But the office did get into computers, I would say, in an embryonic way, around the time we did Jeddah, in the late 1970s. And we had a very nice fellow who knew about computers, but not much about architecture. And he was trying to train people to use what is now called CAD, you know. But the Jeddah building, these tents, could only have been done with computers; and that was done in Chicago by Faz Khan. And by that time Khan and his engineers were totally dependent on computers.

Zane: So, that’s one of the reasons that this building is significant in the history of SOM?

Radford: Are you talking of the New Orleans?

Zane: Yes. I am talking about the New Orleans building.

Radford: It’s a nice building. Where’s a picture of it? I’ve just got the photograph. [looking through photographs] These are all my old photographs. I should have…

Zane: No. Next time I’ll bring the book.

Radford: Oh, we’ve probably got them. They’re probably downstairs. Oh, here’s New Orleans.

Zane: And Brussels looked a lot like this?

Radford: Well, more sophisticated. This is much simpler. I don’t have Brussels, although I was involved. When Brussels decided to expand—these buildings frequently were made bigger—I was involved for a time. And then that collapsed because of the first Arab embargo, in 1973.

Zane: Oh, and here’s that Noguchi sculpture.

Radford: There we are. Yes.

Zane: Interesting. Where’s the tree?

Radford: The tree’s in the back.

[Tape 2: Side B]

Zane: Let’s move on to Kansas City.

Radford: Ah, now Kansas City, which they also wanted to do, then we decided—and this was a definite thought of Gordon’s to try and expand the Brussels crosses, which were probably half that size. And we decided to do this. And this is America; we’ll make them bigger. I actually don’t like the building, because we never really solved the base. The crosses come right down to the floor. And at Brussels and New Orleans, we floated the base. It’s a very simple building. One of the interesting things was how to have these things made, which are fifteen feet high and probably twenty feet long. And Kansas City has a honeycomb of tunnels. I’ve forgotten what came out of these tunnels in the first place. Was it salt? And these tunnels have absolutely constant temperature. And that’s where these things were made. And the contractor rented some of these tunnels, built all these, and let them cure in this constant temperature, which was very important for the concrete.

Zane: It looks like a honeycomb.

Radford: Yes. Well, these are buildings where we were trying to put the glass behind, to get some shading from the sun. We were very conscious of that. And it did affect the air-conditioning.

Zane: Very interesting.

Radford: Both these buildings, New Orleans and Kansas City, they were both for the same client. But I’ve always been more pleased with this…

Zane: Largely because you’ve got your floating base?

Radford: Yes. But also, it’s a wonderful play of light. Maybe it’s because of the scale, you know.

Zane: They were a good client?

Radford: Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I think they then decided the business experiment must have either not worked, or they decided to do something else. I don’t know at what time they hired Pei to do their new building in Boston, probably about that time. Because when we were working with them, when we went to Boston we went to the old building.

Zane: How is that? When you have one client who uses you for one thing, and then they flip over to somebody else for something else?

Radford: Happens all the time. Happens all the time.

Zane: No one takes that personally?

Radford: Well, I think the people who lose are disappointed! We were asked by a bank in Toronto called the Toronto Dominion Bank to design a building. But there was also a developer involved; I regret to say I can’t remember his

name. And this was to be a series of two towers, and a stock exchange for Toronto. And we worked on it for six months, I would say. And suddenly, Gordon sent for me, and said, “I’ve just had a call from…” What is her name? Bronfman. [Phyllis Bronfman Lambert]

Zane: Because this was a Bronfman project.

Radford: Yes. Bronfman. What’s her name?

Zane: Phyllis Lambert.

Radford: Phyllis Lambert. That’s right. Funnily enough, the bank chairman was called Lambert, no connection. So, he said, “She’s asked me to go and have a drink this evening.” He said, “She’s never asked me before.” He said, “I think we’re going to be fired.” [laughter] And he went over, and she said—I wasn’t there, of course—she said, “I’m going to Toronto tomorrow, and we’re going to hire Mies.” So, we were disappointed, but we did other things. These things happen. And of course, the most famous thing she did was to get Seagram done by Mies. Because I don’t know if you ever saw—I remember seeing it in the newspaper—that—I’ve forgotten who did it—but Seagram had hired some architect. And it was the most boring building, even in the Park Avenue of those days…

Zane: In the lexicon of boring buildings…

Radford: And I saw this, and I said, “Well, what a pity.” And apparently, Mrs. Lambert saw it too. She was in Paris, and she saw it in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, and she came back and persuaded her father to have Mies. And what a wonderful thing she did. Yes.

Zane: Interesting, isn’t it?

Radford: Now, she’s still involved in this Toronto—based Canadian Center for Architecture. And they did a wonderful show of Mies at the Whitney.

Zane: Maybe before we go on, you’d just back a little—just to sort of bring us up to date on your personal life. Because you said, in the middle of some of these early projects, that you and your wife were married.

Radford: Oh, yes.

Zane: Yes. You met where?

Radford: We met here. My wife had been married before, and had to go back to England to finalize her divorce, so she went back for a few months. And then we were married in London in 1956. We came back together, yes.

Zane: And she was still working…

Radford: Actually, no. She worked maybe six months or so before she went back to England, and when she came back, she didn’t go back. We had a child, then another child; and she worked for a time while she was pregnant with our first, with Ulrich Franzen, who is still around, I think. He’s a marvelous man, and a very good architect. I don’t know if he still practices, but he did some wonderful things.

Zane: So she trained, and she just never…

Radford: Well, that was the problem in those days. Maybe I was responsible, but we couldn’t have afforded the childcare. The amount of money she could have earned as an architect would not be enough. And I wasn’t earning much, you know.

Zane: Well, that tells you a lot too, right?

Radford: Yes. I think that’s changed now. I hope it has. I hope it has. But, it was very difficult.

Zane: It was like being an artist.

Radford: Yes. Very much so. And so, in fact, we never had full-time help, all the way through. As a result, we have two fine children. [laughter]

Zane: Well, now that’s interesting that you say it in exactly that way.

Radford: Well, I think you did similarly.

Zane: I did. I did. And I don’t disagree with that. So you have a son, Simon. He was your first-born?

Radford: Yes. And that round thing up there is his telescope—or will be his—it’s a twenty-five meter telescope. And it is enclosed in this football. And the interesting thing is: that is the size of the Pantheon. And the building we did at Jeddah, each of the plastic roofs is also the size of the Pantheon.

Zane: So that’s Simon, the astronomer.

Radford: He’s the astronomer at Cal Tech. And Oliver is in Cambridge.

Zane: Oliver. And he’s an architect.

Radford: He’s an architect, yes.

Zane: So, everybody’s got artistic and mathematical genes.

Radford: Yes, indeed. Yes. What time is it now?

Zane: It’s one-thirty.

Radford: Oh, we’re fine. Well, we could talk a little bit about United Carbon, which was not very interesting. Noxzema (Noxell Corporation) is a very simple warehouse, and a simple office building. These were not terribly interesting buildings.

Zane: No, but nothing interesting came out of them for you?

Radford: Well—well yes, of course. Yes.

Zane: Like what?

Radford: It’s a bit difficult to say. We’ve talked about Hancock. United Carbon: nothing interesting came out. Guardian [Life Insurance Co.], I can’t remember where it is now—is it—what is the square where the Flatiron Building is?

Zane: You mean on Twenty-Third Street?

Radford: Yes.

Zane: Oh, it’s Madison Square.

Radford: Well. I think that’s where Guardian is. And it had an existing building. And we built a building at the back. The purpose of the building was just like Connecticut General; it was to make insurance policies, and had big open floors. Very simple; it only had two facades, because one was a building, one was somebody else’s building; a very simple exposed ceiling. And it was fine. It was fine. And they liked it, so that was good. Noxzema was a very simple square warehouse. We built it with steel, everything was steel, but

the outside were panels, maybe twenty feet high, five or six feet wide, which were pre-fabricated and then tilted up and screwed to the steel. The whole building looked like a series of panels; there were no windows, and few doors. There was a funny story about it. When we began, we were told it would be high enough for two pallets of Noxzema to be put one above the other. And I’m probably to get the dimension wrong, but let’s say that produced fifteen feet. About halfway through the development of the drawings—not the building—we were told they decided to put three pallets. So it would be twenty-two feet. So we changed it all. We weren’t told what happened until much later. When the building was built, and they started doing this, they found that the third pallet crushed the contents of the lower pallet. [laughter] Noxzema, you know, is a cream; it’s very heavy. [laughter] And I guess they didn’t tell us that till a lot later. Talk about multiple use— one half of the building was then turned into the factory, and actually turned out to be a very good factory—very high, had all these machines inside. And then we built a little office building, which was a one-story building, and that was nice. And that was out in Cockeysville, Maryland, outside Baltimore.

Zane: So you had to travel, I guess.

Radford: Yes.

Zane: Were you gone a lot?

Radford: Yes. Well, in the initial stages, wherever the owner was, one would travel to. The owner wasn’t necessarily…

Zane: You mean in any project, this is how it goes?

Radford: Yes. But then those meetings became fewer. And then when, of course, the thing got into construction, we had people in the field, people who lived there.

Zane: And you would just go check up every once in a while?

Radford: We’d go once in a while. Yes. Yes.

Zane: Which, I guess, is why, or how, you can work on more than one thing at one time?

Radford: Yes. Oh, yes. At this point, I was probably working on five or six things at once. And I had people helping me, you know.

Zane: Was the office still at 575 Madison?

Radford: No. We’d moved to 400 Park Avenue, which is just north of Lever House. And then later we moved to somewhere on Third Avenue.

Zane: Were you living in the city?

Radford: We lived on the East Side. We started in Seventy-Second Street, then we went to Eighty-Seventh Street; then we moved again on Eighty-Seventh Street, then we moved to Eighty-Fifth Street.

Zane: And your kids went to school in Manhattan?

Radford: Went to Allen-Stevenson [School]. Then they went to boarding school. They stopped Allen-Stevenson at the eighth grade. Simon went to Deerfield [Academy], and Ollie went to Milton [Academy].

Zane: When did you move up here [to Hamden]?

Radford: Well, that’s another story. It’s a very short story. In 1965, we decided to buy a country house in Killingworth, which is out here, which we would use at the weekends, and in the summer. And we bought a house, and we were there for ten years. And we came up most weekends throughout the year, and then the family moved up here in the summer, and I would commute at the weekends, and sometimes at the middle of the week, because you could then drive relatively easily from there to New York. And after the children went to boarding school, we were driving home one day, and Jennifer [Radford] said, “You know, I don’t like this two house business. I’d like to have one house.” And at that point, we were passing through New Haven. I didn’t want to live in a conventional suburb, like Greenwich, or—maybe we couldn’t afford it either—because I didn’t want the daily commute. So, we decided we’d buy this house. We kept an apartment in New York, although we downscaled. And I never took the train more than once a day. I would go in on Monday morning, spend the nights on Monday and Tuesday, come back on Wednesday. And I did that for ten years, quite enough traveling on that train. There’s a funny story to that. When I was in Jeddah, there was an English engineer—and we had a lot of time in a job like that, because you’re there for a week, you know, and in the evening you’ve got nothing to do. And he said—puzzled—he said, “I don’t understand. Do you work a four day week?” [laughter] When I said I never take the train more than… [laughter] He had worked out the…

Zane: He figured it out.

Radford: He figured it all out. And now we’re about to leave here. We are hoping to go to an apartment in a retirement home, which is not too far from here.

Zane: What is your wife going to do about gardening?

Radford: You’ve hit the problem. [laughter]

Zane: I was hoping you’d say that there was some way for her…

Radford: No. Well, in theory, there isn’t. Sometimes, these places assign an area where people can garden. But not everybody wants to garden, so they don’t have to provide these for everybody.

Zane: Of course.

Radford: So we’ll have to see. We’ll have to see. We’ll have to travel more and look at gardens. Look at other people’s yards.

Zane: Roger, maybe the last question for the day should be to describe the football stadium project.

Radford: The football stadium. The University of Massachusetts decided to build a campus in Amherst. And the…

Zane: Oh, the Amherst campus wasn’t there before this?

Radford: No. Well, there might have been one or two buildings. I don’t understand the politics of Massachusetts, but there was money available for income- producing buildings for the university. And the income-producing buildings were dormitories, because people pay rent; and a football stadium, cause people buy tickets. They approached Paul Weidlinger, who’s an engineer. And they asked him to go and see them. And Weidlinger was then often at MIT and Harvard. He was well known as an engineer in the Boston area, and was a brilliant engineer. So they said, “We’d like you to design this football stadium.” So, Weidlinger said, “Well, that’s fine. Who’s the architect?” And they said, “Oh, we don’t need an architect. It’s a football stadium.” And he said, “Well, there’s one thing I know that I cannot do, and that’s be the architect. So, I think you ought to get one.” They said, “Well,

you get one.” So, he hired us, and we worked for him. And Paul and Gordon were doing the real thinking, but one of his partners, Matt Levy, who now runs the firm, was delighted to do this. But I think, by the time he’d finished, he realized that the architect does a great deal more than he thought; and he had all these problems. Anyway, what we built was a football stadium [McGuirk Alumni Stadium] for sixteen thousand people, and it cost $1.6 million—a hundred dollars a seat. And we had a series of concrete walls, and between the concrete walls were pre-cast T’s—things that look like this—on which you could put seats. In fact, they were staggered, because these walls sloped, so the T’s did this—crudely. And then, there was one on the other side, so we had a huge concrete wall. And then, over here, we had an enormous bunch of toilets—very simple; it was just a block building with rows and rows of toilets, because at halftime all these people—sixteen thousand people—rush to the toilet. And the building is still there. We put a fence round it with a hedge. So now you look at the thing over a hedge. And the top of these concrete walls had a huge sort of— it wasn’t a cornice—on which we had the numbers. You know: one, two, three, four, five; or A, B, C. The last time I drove by, the numbers were falling off, which was rather sad. But now that campus is huge.

Zane: Yes, it is.

Radford: Because Kevin [Roche] did an immense building for performing arts and visual arts, a very big building. And they have built many, many more buildings. But that was fun.

Zane: Was there anything different about this?

Radford: No. Gordon had the idea. It was a very good idea. Because, as a result—this is a lousy drawing—when you enter the building, you enter the building and walk up, so there were steps at the bottom.

Zane: Oh, so you wouldn’t enter from the top and walk down?

Radford: No, no. No, no. The top was out in the sky.

Zane: We’re going to stop for today, and talk about what we’re going to do next time.

Radford: Okay. Well, Sharon, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope it’s been helpful.

[Tape 3: Side A]

Zane: Let me say that this is an interview with Roger Radford, for the SOM Oral History. It is November 19th, 2007. We are in Hamden, Connecticut. I got it right this time. Roger, could you say something for me?

Radford: Good morning Sharon. Nice to see you again.

Zane: Let me say that we will start today by backtracking a little. Roger, you wanted to talk a little bit—since we did talk about your father last time, and you did, as you say, only mention your stepmother very briefly, you wanted to add a little something to the record. And I think you should go ahead and do that now.

Radford: Well, the interesting thing is, during the war, my stepmother was in command of all the women in the Fire Service for one of the twelve civil defense regions into which the country was divided. And this arose because in England, before the war, fire brigades were handled locally by towns, villages, and cities; and, as the bombardment began, there were problems of mobilization. One town would say: No, we’re not going to send you our fire brigade, because we may get bombed. So the government nationalized the Fire Service, and divided it into twelve regions. When the war was over, that was disbanded. But my mother was called a Regional Woman Fire Officer,

in charge of maybe three or four thousand women. When the war was over, she continued to go to meetings to do with welfare for these women.

Zane: You mean the women who had served.

Radford: The women who had served. And then she became a magistrate, and a justice of the peace. And she really concentrated on family and children’s cases.

Zane: Had she had training in these sorts of areas?

Radford: Nope. No. The magistrates in England are largely local citizens.

Zane: I see.

Radford: In fact, I don’t think any of them are lawyers. And they have limited [powers]. For example, if someone came before them on a murder case, they could only send it up to the next court.

Zane: And her name was what?

Radford: Lena Radford.

Zane: I would imagine that it was—that was not an easy thing to do, though.

Radford: Well, of course, I was at school. She seemed to enjoy it. And she drove all over this area, which was probably a hundred and fifty miles square, roughly speaking. And she went to visit the…

Zane: I think, as you had pointed out, though, that this area was not in particular danger during the war.

Radford: Well, many parts of it were attacked, not as badly as in London. The town that we lived in wasn’t hit. But in the whole region, there was bombardment, yes.

Zane: The region being what?

Radford: Well, it was called the East Midlands. She was a powerful woman, mentally, and…

Zane: And she, basically, was your mother. Brought you up.

Radford: She brought me up.

Zane: Okay.

Radford: Well, thank you.

Zane: You’re welcome. I think we had agreed that we were going to try to tackle Lincoln Center today.

Radford: Oh, all right.

Zane: And it—unless…

Radford: No, that’s fine. I’m wondering what we’ll say about Lincoln Center.

Zane: At what point did you and the firm come into the whole process?

Radford: Well, I got involved in 1960. I think the firm had been involved in either ’59, or maybe earlier—it seemed to me we got involved on the ground floor. There had been a few meetings, which I was not involved in. Now as you know—you know the story of Lincoln Center…

Zane: Well, but that doesn’t matter. You need to tell it here.

Radford: There were seven constituents: opera, music hall, philharmonic, repertory theater, dance theater, and the library. And later, there was the Juilliard School.

Zane: Right. And there was, actually, a music theater constituent, too, at the beginning. But then that didn’t really affect you, because that was all located—it was a constituent for a while, but it was located in the New York State Theater.

Radford: Oh, the Johnson building.

Zane: Yes, right.

Radford: Yes. Well, most of these constituents were very large—in terms of their monetary value, the size was very large. The library and repertory theater were very small. And Eero Saarinen was the architect for the repertory theater, and our firm—and Bunshaft was the designer—was the architect for the New York Public Library.

Zane: That was all accomplished before you got there.

Radford: They had been hired. These two men, who knew each other and respected each other, came up with the idea that it would be better to combine these two elements, because, first of all, physically, that was where they had to be, but also, that would make a more significant building. And that’s how we began. So my first job was working with the New York Public Library. This was a research collection, including dance, theater, music, rare books. And these were going to be consolidated from other parts of the library system. The theater occupied the central core. I’m not going to make a real diagram.

You went into the theater—here were seats—and the library was wrapped around it on one level, which were public reading rooms; and then on the roof—on the huge attic was the storage facility—the reference facilities— they were more than storage. And the structure of this massive attic, really, had concrete beams with supports on the side to make a space for the theater. So our job was really the fitting in of this internal stuff into this space. The design of the total building was really a cooperative effort between Bunshaft and Eero.

Zane: Now what normally is that like? I mean two very strong egos…

Radford: It was absolutely fascinating. And it was quite difficult. It was quite difficult.

Zane: Could you give me a couple of examples?

Radford: Yes, I can. [searches for and finds book] Because this is the first Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—that’s the title of the book—1950 to 1962. And it’s the first one.

Zane: It’s the first of several books on the firm’s work.

Radford: Here is the plan of this massive top story, which housed the library. For example, this is the music section. These are carrels where people could come and play back things again and again. The example we were given [to work with]: a conductor comes to Lincoln Center, and he wants to conduct two or three pieces, he can get previous recordings, and listen to them, and change and adjust what he’s listening to by himself. So this was really a study thing. This was theater, this was…

Zane: To be clear: we’re looking now at the drawings of the library.

Radford: Right. And these were the reading areas for the different divisions. Now, coming to the architecture: here is the drawing from the north, showing this upper floor, which had no windows; and if you go to the plan, you will see these big concrete girders, which had holes in them to allow—and they were held up on these columns. Now, when we got to the front of the building— here is the top—and over here, you will see two columns. Now, you talked about the relationship between these two architects. Eero very much wanted double columns—and I am a partisan in this—for which there was no reason, because he wanted also to have this clear space in the middle. So, there was a big debate involved.

Zane: Clear space meaning nothing in front of the…

Radford: Nothing—to be clear for the theater.

Zane: Right.

Radford: To be clear—which, I assume is under here. Yeah, here’s the theater. And here are the columns. Another row of columns there would have had no function. It had nothing to do with the structure.

Zane: The reason he wanted them? Design?

Radford: I guess so. Well, this debate went on for some time. And at one point, I was sent out to Saarinen’s office in Bloomfield Hills, where they did it. Gordon and I had prepared drawings of this. And we had a very strong case. But all I had were drawings, because I was flying out there. When I got there, they had an enormous model. Eero did everything with models. So did we, for that matter. But he did models of immense size. So we went into a studio room, and there was a model—oh, as big as that window [pointing]. And he presented the arguments for these double columns, and I just listened. And then I said, “Well, I am representing this end particularly, but we’ll talk

about both ends.” And I said, “I don’t have a model, but I have some drawings. I’d like to put them up on the wall.” So I got up, and I walked towards the wall, and I tripped over the model, and the whole thing fell down. So, Eero said, “Let’s go to lunch.” Well, the saga continued. I came back to New York. We had another meeting in New York, and a very extraordinary thing happened. Eero did not give up easily, but Gordon knew that it was very important to Eero to have the working drawings of this job in his office. We didn’t need the working drawings, because our involvement financially was very small. His was much bigger, much bigger. So the day before the meeting, Gordon said to me, “You’re going to be surprised, but I have a proposition. He can do the working drawings, and we’ll have our single columns.” So, we went into this meeting—I’m laughing—we went into this meeting, and Gordon made this proposal. And Kevin [Roche] and Eero were sitting on the other side. And Gordon said, “I think you’d like to think about it.” So Eero began to say, “You know, Gordon, when the history of the architecture of our time is written, you will be known as the strong, straight-forward architect, and I will be known for innovation.” Gordon cut him off, and said, “Eero, when the history of architecture is written, we’ll be lucky to be in the footnotes.” [laughs] So we left. And when we came back, it was agreed. Now, I’m not sure whether this shows collaboration or a clash of personalities. The real tragedy is, within a year, Eero was dead. But that had nothing to do with this.

Zane: So, the architecture of it was a collaborative thing.

Radford: It was a collaborative thing.

Zane: And, this is one example of how it was difficult? But in general, the overall conception…

Radford: Oh, it worked very well. It worked very well. And, of course, the people who did the working drawings were what we called in those days job

captains. The man at Eero’s office and our people worked very well together. I’ve always felt that the basic design appearance of this was as much… There had already been agreement that the whole Center should be built in travertine, so all that had to be done was working that out. Now, I notice that this shows very little of this, because this was an immense and fascinating project, as you know.

Zane: Yes. Well, would you care to say anything else about that?

Radford: No, it was just very interesting. Yes.

Zane: Was it received with varying degrees of success/criticism? Well, you know, it’s been a source—we’re talking now about the theater, the internal portion of the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

Radford: Well, in the same day when I fell over the model, as they were rebuilding the model, Eero took me aside and showed me the enormous model—you could put your head in and see all this. And he started with this whole business that he really, as [Walter] Gropius had done, wanted to build a theater in the round-an egg in a glass box. But there was a fellow called [Jo] Mielziner, who had been hired—as you know, more than I do—had been hired as the drama consultant. I don’t know—he was an impresario. And he wanted to be able to have a normal stage, and a thrust stage. And that’s how all this developed. And Eero had been working on this for many years, in abstract. So for him, it was a wonderful opportunity. I’ve always liked the building, but I’m not a critic of the theater. I don’t know what’s happened to it. It’s gone through several stages of operation.

Zane: It has. But it’s still basically the same.

Radford: Same thing. Yes.

Zane: And so talk a little bit more about whatever else there was involved with your portion of it.

Radford: It was a fairly straightforward. In fact, a lot of it was interior design: furniture, and that sort of thing, which was a big job. The library were marvelous clients. And the four or five individuals responsible for the particular segments—you know, the dance lady, whose name I’ve forgotten, and the theater man, and the rare book man: they were all very interesting people, and were very good to work with.

Zane: And there was enough money so that you could basically do what you needed to do?

Radford: No, the budget for the furniture, which was important, was very small. Oh my God, I haven’t the figures now. The budget for the total building? Oh, as always, Mrs. Vivian Beaumont Allen had given $3 million, and I think the total building was between $7 million and $10 million. Now, I don’t think Mrs. Allen expected to build a whole building. Maybe she did.

Zane: And anything else about those meetings? They were meetings [of all the architects], joint meetings.

Radford: There were several meetings. One of the things that, from my point of view, was so nice that I got to know Kevin Roche very well, which I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And then, of course, when Eero died, he and [John] Dinkeloo started their own firm, and I had nothing to do with that, except that I would see them from time to time. And they did wonderful work.

Zane: Anything else about Eero?

Radford: No, not really. Not really, no. He was a very nice man—sort of bear of a man. In fact, the funny thing is, in a way, when I said he was a bear of a

man, Gordon was a bear of a man, too. The two of them were very strong, and very honest, intellectually, you know. And they both fought for what they thought was right.

Zane: And just your own personal point of view about the design of this combined building?

Radford: I thought it was a great success. I really did. There was a difficulty, of course, in tying it in to the other buildings at Lincoln Center. And I was always—where are we? I’m lost [consulting the book]. Oh, here we are. You see, this little link, which is where the library—I was always concerned by the relationship of this to this building, which is the opera. Yes, the opera. And I never really liked the façade of the opera, you know. And [Wallace] Harrison went through so many alterations of the design, but always finished up with the five arches here. Am I not right in thinking this is a series of closely-spaced columns?

Zane: That’s right.

Radford: So, the design of the façade is totally different from the façade of that, which in those days, I didn’t think was a good idea. Now, I would not be so dogmatic about that.

Zane: But, as you say, its relationship to the other buildings: there was some difficulty among the architects in agreeing on an overall…

Radford: Yes. Oh, the initial… Well, in fact, you’ve raised a very good point. You asked how soon I was involved. I think that there were discussions with all the architects: [Max] Abramovitz, [Wallace] Harrison, [Philip] Johnson, the two of our people, before any assignment of design of buildings was done, and that concerned the distribution of the plan. And as you well know, [Robert] Moses refused to give up the park. So the whole plan of this

magnificent Center was this L-shape. What would have happened had it not been there, I don’t know. Now, these buildings are very big compared with this, and the development of this pool and the sculpture was a very important part to make this sub-courtyard attractive.

Zane: And it did?

Radford: Oh, I think so. No, I’m very proud of that building. It’s a nice building.

Zane: And the choice of Moore for that?

Radford: Gordon did that. Gordon was a great friend of Moore, and used him on many projects. I don’t think the Lincoln Center objected; but, in fact, he negotiated with Moore, and they agreed on the sculpture, and the piece of sculpture, and how it would be done.

Zane: Two extraneous questions, but I’m interested: You’re an architect, and architects are sort of forced to be planners; did you have a feeling then, or do you have a feeling now, about what it means to take, you know, several large institutions and cluster them together, as opposed to perhaps affecting various parts of a city?

Radford: I don’t really have an opinion. Except, I think in the case of New York, in a way this was a drop in the bucket. You know, there’s still Brooklyn, there are still all these other places. I think the benefits of having these people together—when the Juilliard came in, for example, as a school, it was a benefit for those students of having these facilities right there.

Zane: Well, that’s for sure.

Radford: Because they were involved in all of them. And so I think it was a good decision, although, as I know, there’s a lot of criticism. Is that still modern planning theory?

Zane: I don’t—it was just a debate [at the time].

Radford: I think Mrs. [Jane] Jacobs, I’m sure, did not approve. Of course, I don’t know whether she did or not.

Zane: I am guessing she would not have. Anything else at all about Lincoln Center? Its significance to the firm, or how Gordon felt about it at the end? Anything you can add?

Radford: No, I don’t think so. And it sounds pompous, but in a way, once the basic design had been agreed on with Eero, once the drawings were being made, it just became another job. We had enough people to handle it. The construction went on for many years. And in that phase, I would frequently go to meetings where Dinkeloo was involved, cause Dinkeloo was in charge of construction, and he was a magnificent builder. He was a magnificent architect, but he was a particularly good builder. It was marvelous being in a meeting with Dinkeloo. No, I don’t think so. It was a great success, and then we moved on to other things.

Zane: Okay. So maybe we will move on to other things, too.

Radford: Okay. So, that was finished in ’65. Actually, there is a funny story I could tell. When the thing [the theater/library at Lincoln Center] was opened. Where’s the stamped drawing?

Zane: The thing being Lincoln Center.

Radford: Lincoln Center. Here’s the entrance to the library/museum. A Calder Stabile was placed there, which I think is still there.

Zane: Yes.

Radford: And Newbold Morris, who was then the parks commissioner, gave a speech in which he said, “Well, I suppose others have thought this would be a fine piece of sculpture. I’m just here to open it.” Sandy [Alexander] Calder stood up and said, “Thank God for Newbold Morris.” [laughs] It was the funniest clash of two public figures.

Zane: Was Calder another choice of Gordon’s?

Radford: Yes. Calder. Most of the buildings that I was involved in that had sculpture [had works by] Sandy Calder, [Isamu] Noguchi, and [Henry] Moore, and, later, [Jean] Dubuffet. I wasn’t so much involved in Dubuffet. Well, I was actually, but that sculpture was never executed.

Zane: Which was for which building?

Radford: That was for Brussels. I don’t think it was executed. I’ll come to Brussels later, because I was involved in the second one. We did a building in Brussels, and I was not involved; then they wanted to make it bigger, and I was involved. And I think that’s when Dubuffet was involved. And I cannot remember, I regret to say, whether the sculpture was built. Because the project came to an end with the oil crisis of 1973, and I don’t think it was resuscitated until years later, and I had nothing to do with that then. I think Gordon had retired by then.

Zane: This use of artists, and of sculpture…

Radford: It was very significant to Gordon. He was a collector in his own right of paintings and sculpture. And he always was anxious to involve artists in buildings, and in interiors, and in landscape. It was very important to him. And he persuaded clients to do it. Now, in some cases, he had clients who were only too willing, such as David Rockefeller, is a great collector himself. In the building of the American Republic, I think, he [Bunshaft] educated Watson Powell, who became a collector, and collected art for this rather small building.

Zane: Which we’re going to talk about.

Radford: Which we’re going to talk about.

Zane: But was Gordon especially known for this? Or were other architects doing the same thing at this time, to the same degree?

Radford: Well, I think Gordon was… Well, in our firm, [Walter] Netsch was a collector, but not to the same degree. Not to the same degree. I’m trying to think. Well, the office in San Francisco did a hotel in Hawaii. A man called Davis Allen, who actually worked in New York and who was a brilliant interior decorator—he was an architect, but his forte was being a decorator- would travel all over the world getting artifacts for this hotel. And that was a very important part of the design of the hotel. I’ve never been there, and I wasn’t involved. Then, if we start in relation to my own career, for Connecticut General, Gordon and the owner agreed on having Noguchi. Noguchi designed the courtyards, and built the sculpture. At Reynolds, I don’t think there was any sculpture. And at Chase, which I was involved with, there was a lot. Then there was the library, which we’ve talked about. But these buildings for individual clients, or individual companies …with 140 Broadway, which comes a little bit later on [in my career], we got into the first office building which was built for speculation, as far as the building owners were concerned. And that becomes a totally different thing.

And it so happened at 140 Broadway, we were hired by the principal tenant, and that led to the red cube in front of it.

Zane: The principal tenant being whom?

Radford: Being the Marine Midland Bank. The Chicago office began doing office buildings earlier than we did in New York. We were lucky—of course it was not for me, because I was too junior—but we were lucky in having buildings where people wanted a specific purpose, and it was almost like designing a house, a very big house. The Chicago office got into these speculative buildings. And I remember once at some meeting, Walter Netsch, who wanted to design schools and theaters, and such, saying, “You know, these are clients I don’t have much taste for.” And that’s very interesting. I think I may have told you that story last week. Now, we inherited 140 Broadway, because the original developer was killed. The developer, who was a relatively young man, was coming to New York from Chicago, and the plane crashed, and he was killed. Somehow, his interests were taken up by [Harry] Helmsley. And Helmsley—we had been working on the project in the zoning area—I’m sure you know that New York City zoning is rather complicated, to say the least.

Zane: Unless you have a lot of money.

Radford: We had lots of money—that’s the point. We had lots of studies to develop 140 Broadway, which actually, is very interesting. I’ll see if I can find it. I hope it’s in here.

Zane: What was there before? Was it just old, low-rise buildings? Because 140 is way downtown, so.

Radford: Well, next to it is the—where the hell is 140 Broadway?—is the building which started New York City zoning. I’ll come to that.

Zane: This is great, Roger, that you have these books. It’s wonderful.

Radford: Here we are. Now, next—they never have—never have enough plans [in them]. Here’s 140 Broadway. Here is the Chase Manhattan Bank. Now, when the Rockefeller brothers decided to rescue downtown, Chase bought all this land here [pointing], and they closed Cedar Street. The zoning permitted buildings of a thirty percent area of the site. Now the reason that happened: this building, the Equitable Building, built in 1916, went straight up many, many stories—fifty or sixty stories, and had no regard for its neighbors, no light and air. So that led to the 1916 Zoning Ordinance. And that, in general, led to this sort of building, one with setbacks. But then there was a later zoning ordinance, which permitted, provided you built only thirty or twenty-five percent, going as high as you liked. Now, when we got into 140 Broadway—here was Chase, through the park—we decided that the city—I think—I think that street was closed, except for fire trucks. Anyway, the size of the building was determined by the zoning, but the setbacks were also. And that led to this shape, which to the layman is not apparent.

Zane: It’s a rhomboid.

Radford: It’s a rhomboid. I have known people who’ve worked in that building, and when I’ve said, “Well, you know, it has this funny shape,” they’ve said, “Well what funny shape? This is a perfectly ordinary building.” But that was a very lengthy work that was done. And that’s when Helmsley took it over. And Helmsley had two associates with whom we worked, and it was relatively benign relationship. But there was one thing that was sort of funny: Helmsley very much wanted a sense of verticality. And the basic design of this building is this black grid. So, our solution to verticality was to emphasize the window-washing tracks, which are in all these tall buildings.

Zane: But you rarely notice, really.

Radford: Well, they’re in Lever House, they’re at Chase; they’re all over the place. And eventually, he accepted that as vertical enough. The building was a success, a tremendous commercial success. I have been told by the real estate people who were involved that they were lucky. When this building was finished, downtown was starving for office space, so they made a killing out of it. But it’s a marvelous building.

Zane: Marvelous because?

Radford: Oh, it’s a wonderful design. It’s so straightforward, and it’s elegant in the use of its materials. It’s one of the ones I’m extremely proud to have been involved in.

Zane: It is beautiful. Oh, we had started this because you were going to tell me the story of the red cube.

Radford: Oh, the red cube. Well, here we finished up with this empty space. So, Gordon suggested that Noguchi get involved. And Noguchi came up, first of all, with a series of rocks—that’s the only way I can describe it—and he had a model of these things, and he put these rocks in there. It didn’t really—I was just an observer—but it didn’t really do much. And Gordon, actually, said, “You know, Isamu, why don’t you pick up all these rocks, and put them in one block?” So Noguchi went away, and came back with this distorted cube, on one edge, with a hole in the middle. And the hole in the middle is—somewhere there’s a picture; maybe I have a picture of the hole in the middle…

Zane: Well, there’s another picture here. I was just looking… Here, you can see it out the…

Radford: Oh yes. Well, but there’s a dramatic picture somewhere.

Zane: You do feel a verticality in this room, from the inside.

Radford: Oh, there’s a lot of verticality. Here’s the picture. See, the inside was fluted. That was the sort of thing that Noguchi did. He was fascinated by surface, both in polishing steel, polishing marble, polishing granite. But this was actually a construction. This is painted aluminum. We had to make a working drawing of it. It’s a big thing. Each side of this is sixteen feet. It is probably thirty-five feet high.

Zane: It’s very dramatic. And did Harry Helmsley accept this?

Radford: Oh yes.

Zane: No, I thought you were saying something about, with some of these developers…

Radford: Well, I suppose the curious thing was …Greenfield, I think his name was, died, as I said, and Helmsley inherited us. And enough work had been done that it was in his interest to keep us as architects. He hired us for this building; he never hired us again. [laughs] And he built buildings all over the place.

Zane: But of the same merit, would you say?

Radford: Well, I might say not. I might say not. That’s a loaded question.

Zane: Yes. This [building, 140 Broadway] is beautiful. And this fit in very nicely with the Chase Building.

Radford: With Chase, yes. And then, later, we designed U.S. Steel on the other side of the street, which is now called something else. [searching in book] Here we

are. [pointing] This is 140 Broadway. Here’s U.S. Steel. There must be a plan somewhere. Here’s Chase, with its courtyard; here’s 140; and then here was U.S. Steel; and here’s Broadway. Now, from my point of view: I was involved in the planning of this building. It’s an enormous building. The building—very interesting development. This had been the site of the Singer Building, which was a famous building, which was demolished by U.S. Steel. Nowadays, I don’t think they could have done it. Anyway, they did.

Zane: The Singer Building was famous because…?

Radford: As a work of early twentieth-century architecture. I can’t remember who the architect was. The demolition of the Singer Building was going to take a year. So we were given a year to plan the building, and to do research into the uses of steel. Well, that sounded a wonderful idea. And a great deal was done. One of the most notable physical results was that it was agreed that bare steel should be on the outside, provided the back was fully fireproofed. And of course, the building is sprinklered; and there were tremendous precautions.

Zane: Why?

Radford: Steel is not fireproof, in itself. It melts. And the proof of the pudding is that when the Trade Center was demolished, this building was damaged, but it’s still there. It’s still there.

Zane: Meaning what, Roger? Be a little more specific? I’m confused.

Radford: [pointing] Here is the bare steel. And the fireproofing is wrapped around, and is at the back.

Zane: I see.

Radford: And that was considered, and was accepted by the fire people, the authorities, to be safe. In a way, you could regard this as added, like the shingles on a house are added. This, however, is part of the structure of the building, that piece of steel.

Zane: The vertical.

Radford: The vertical It’s part of the structure. It’s a very powerful building. But…

Zane: Yes? There’s no but?

Radford: Well, it’s—I don’t know. It’s a strong building, but I’ve never really felt very fond of it. How about if I put it that way?

Zane: And for what reason? If you can articulate it?

Radford: I don’t know. Maybe it’s the proportion. Let’s go to the plan. You see, there’s a subtle difference between that proportion and this proportion. These things sort of worry me. But it’s fine.

Zane: Was he happy with it?

Radford: Oh yes. And, as I say, I was involved very much in this planning. There was a very complicated system of elevators. And then I went on and did something else. But no, it’s a fine building.

Zane: Was there a piece of art associated with this, also?

Radford: I don’t think so.

Zane: Before we move on, anything else about 140 Broadway? Where it sits, its relationship to the other structures around it?

Radford: I think the relationship to the other buildings—the existing buildings and the future buildings—is fine. It’s fine. Now… I’m wondering whether we should take a look at American Republic. Marine Midland was finished in 1967. I’m getting my timing off. Well, of course, these buildings take a long time to build. American Republic was finished in ’65. American Republic Insurance Company, in Des Moines. Watson Powell had inherited this company from his father, who had founded this company. It was a mutual company, run by a board of five people: two of his colleagues, his lawyer, his wife, and himself. And they wanted to build a new building in Des Moines. He researched other architects and other buildings, and eventually, he finished up at Connecticut General, in Hartford. And he was so impressed by Connecticut General that he telephoned our office, and said he wanted to speak to someone who would have been involved in Connecticut General. Connecticut General had been finished in 1954. And this was late on a Friday afternoon, and the only person who had anything to do with it was a young man who was doing some shop drawings to do with some minor revision. So the telephone operator put through the call. And this fellow was bright enough to realize that the caller did not want to talk about Connecticut General, so he switched the call to our business manager. There were no partners in the office. And Bill Bailey, who’s the business manager, said we would get in touch with him on Monday. On Monday, Bill Brown, who was the partner, whom I have mentioned before, called Powell. He and one of his colleagues came over, and they said that they had a site in Des Moines, and that they wanted to build a building there. We all went out to Des Moines. And the site, frankly, was not a very good site. It was on a steep hillside, and really had nothing. Bill and I drove around, and we looked at this site, and, eventually, we said to him, “You know, we think you ought to look for some other sites.” So he came up with a site in the middle of the city, and he accepted that decision. [searching through a reprint in Progressive Architecture] Unfortunately, there are no site plans in this. There should be site plans for these things. [searching through a book] Well, maybe

we can use this. The site: there’s a fairly steep street here [pointing], an important street there, and then about this far over is another street, and this was a vacant lot. He bought this piece. And I think there were three hundred and fifty employees, something like that. And so we developed this plan with clear span office space on all the lower floors. I think there were…

Zane: Now, clear span office space means what?

Radford: Well, there were no columns in the middle. So here is the space, which is, I suppose, sixty feet wide, and forty or fifty feet deep. And that was totally free for any arrangement of furniture that they wanted, and—except on the top floor where they had offices and the boardroom, and things like that. And it’s a fairly small building. We had four elevators, and the toilets and the stairs were all in the middle. And then—this is the interesting thing, architecturally—these photographs show the drama rather than the facts… Here we are.

Zane: This is the building?

Radford: And this is a poured concrete wall, which is reduced in thickness as it gets higher— I can’t remember—from here to here. Here are the girders, which are shaped like π. Here we are. And within that girder…

Zane: Like the letter pi.

Radford: Like the letter pi. Within the girder, we arranged the air-conditioning duct, and on the top of the air-conditioning duct was the lighting, which was reflected through this thing painted white. And as I mentioned last time, one of the fascinating things about this building is that we were able to integrate the air-conditioning and the lighting, and the structure, into the basic design; and in a way, this became the decoration of the building—you know, the—well, here it is. That’s the ceiling.

Zane: Look at that. That’s beautiful.

Radford: And it really was very successful. Now, the poured concrete wall then…

Zane: Was that on the same as on the other side?

Radford: Yes. Yes. There were two walls. They were picked up by these eight columns; the load from the concrete was transferred by these enormous hinges. These are eight feet—probably ten feet—high, six inch pieces of steel, welded together. And that enabled the intermediate floor here, to be used for the lounge and the cafeteria. And that produced, in fact, a very dramatic building, as you can see. And then the poured concrete was sandblasted. And this is smooth concrete, straight out of the mold; but this was sandblasted, so there’s a sort of textural difference between the walls and the structure. There must be a better picture somewhere. Wait a minute. I’m going to take this [the microphone] off. I’ve got something… This is an early meeting…

Zane: This is the photograph.

Radford: Oh yes. This is the owner, Watson Powell; his associate, whose name, I regret to say, I can’t remember; and me. The building had been designed with windows here, for these supplementary offices. We eventually decided to take them out. And I don’t think we finished up with the—do we have these—do we have all the—oh yes, we do. This is important to bring in air for the total system.

Zane: Well, here’s a Calder.

Radford: Oh yes.

Zane: Yes. Used again on this building.

Radford: Yes. And Calder, we suggested. Because this is the case where the company was going very well, and they decided to build this building, because they were in good shape. Powell began to be interested in the idea of modern art. He didn’t know…he and his wife went off to Europe for several weeks, and he came back full of zeal as a collector. And he collected things. He had Andy Warhol make one of his multiples of his father, which was called, “American Man.” And that’s Watson Powell, Sr. I had a colleague called Jack Dunbar, who did the interiors of this building, and he worked with Watson to collect art for the whole building. And Gordon and Watson agreed to get Sandy Calder to come and do this Stabile. Sadly enough, the last time I saw Watson before he died, they’d decided to sell the Calder. And that’s, I think, the problem of a company run by five people. The Calder, which cost thirty thousand dollars, was now worth half a million. It is very sad. I don’t know what they put there. He told me they chose something else. This, I discovered the other day, which is amusing: these are drawings—they’re probably very rare drawings; I can’t remember that I made any of them, most of them are done by Gordon—as we worked— sometimes it would be my pencil, sometimes his. But these are the way this building developed, you see. At one point, we were going to straddle the building—to straddle the lower building. Now, in a way, you can say this does straddle it; by separating this, we get this air at that point. It’s a very dramatic building—floating. Then we got into these. I just…

Zane: This is an interesting example of how—of how…

Radford: The way it was done.

Zane: …of how you worked, how the collaborative design process works.

Radford: Yes. See, we kept going on and on. And I think most of these are sketches of Gordon’s, which I then used to make other drawings. And here is—boy, I haven’t looked at these for so long. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of the building; I worked on it all the way through to the end. Powell became a good friend. And I think it’s a very successful building. I haven’t seen it since then, since ’65, so I assume it’s all right.

Zane: So, you can’t speak to what it looks like without the Calder?

Radford: What it looks like now.

Zane: They ended up selling it.

Radford: Yes, but sad as that is, the Calder’s not vital to the building.

Zane: No.

Radford: That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. And then now, that system…

Zane: This is the system…

Radford: That system of the air, of the structure embracing the air, and the lighting, we then used that in a modified form in the American Can building, which we should probably go on to that now. Which is a much bigger building, in Greenwich, Connecticut, done in 1973. And that was a marvelous building, because of its site. Here we are [pointing to the plan in a book]. This is the site: a very hilly site, going down to some highway over here. And we decided to bridge this ravine with the building. And underneath the building, we put a garage. So you enter here and leave here, and then you go to the five levels of the garage, under here. It’s a wonderful wooded site. Here are these dramatic things, driving into here.

Zane: Into the garage.

Radford: Into the garage.

Zane: What is it? Five levels?

Radford: Five levels. Five levels. Everybody has a parking place.

Zane: How many employees were there when you designed this?

Radford: I would say there were probably three thousand.

Zane: So, very different from the last building [we just talked about].

Radford: Oh yes. Much bigger. It’s comparable in size to Connecticut General.

Zane: So, you were just given this site…

Radford: We were given the site. I remember Gordon saying, “You know, my God, we should pay you for this site!” He was so excited. And as you can see, here are these dramatic pictures. There was nothing on it at all. Nothing on it at all.

Zane: Talk a little bit about how you went about figuring out what to put on it, and how to do it?

Radford: Well, the engineer was Paul Weidlinger. And one of the first things was that the idea developed of filling in this ravine with the garage, and the building floating at the top. But then it became clear that the excavation was going to be extremely expensive. So we had to do a lot of cost evaluation of how to get this garage to work. And the result was that there are a lot of columns on that.

Zane: I see you smiling as you’re looking at it.

Radford: It’s amazing, but this is actually sixty feet. These big beams go this way—I think they do, anyway. And—yep, there they are. So these beams, with the ducts and the lights, are going this way; and this forest of columns then goes right through to the basement. And this: sixty feet apart, is an ideal dimension for parking. What had to be done was to make sure that the height of the parking could be worked out, and be economical. And you can see here the slope of the hillside. And here’s the original ravine. We had to dig into here, and into here. But that all got done. Then there was the typical floor. There’s a hole in the middle, a courtyard in the middle, and the elevators and stairs, and so forth, here.

Zane: At each corner.

Radford: At each corner. American Can, unlike insurance companies, had a lot of office people. So the whole perimeter was little offices—not little, actually, rather the same size office. We had been through, in Union Carbide, an elaborate system of adjustable offices. It was done on a sort of rank basis— you know, a certain man of a certain salary had an office this size; a slightly bigger salary, a slightly bigger office, and endless permutations of these partitions. In fact, when Union Carbide eventually left and went to the country, they found they’d never been using this system.

Zane: Meaning that they would just assign…?

Radford: They’d assign—it was too much trouble…

Zane: To figure out who deserved which space?

Radford: And also you’d make this space bigger, so the next one’s smaller; so it’s a…

Zane: Do you mean that you could—that these are movable walls?

Radford: Oh, yes. Movable. Movable partitions. Technically, you could move them; but of course, it had to be done, so you had to dismantle it, and move it, and so forth.

Zane: Was that a new concept?

Radford: Oh, we started that, in Connecticut General; they had a few offices. We did it in Reynolds, where they had a few more offices. And, in fact, the Reynolds Company, and the Hauserman Company, got together and manufactured these as a product. And anyway, by the time we did this, much later, it was clear that it was much better to have standard offices all the way round.

Zane: These were not the executive offices?

Radford: No. Here was the executive…

Zane: They had a whole other wing.

Radford: Then here were the support staff in the middle. The other interesting thing about this building: the town of Greenwich insisted that there be no fluorescent light visible from the outside, because this was in a residential area, and there were important—where is the site plan?—there were important houses over here on the other side. Now, that was fine for us, because all these offices had incandescent light. And any fluorescent stuff was in the middle. Of course, you couldn’t do that now.

Zane: You couldn’t do that now because…?

Radford: I bet right now it would be very difficult with all this concentration on energy saving, because these incandescent lights are not very efficient. They have a soft quality. Hopefully, someone will develop a fluorescent light that has a similar quality. In fact, we have one such bulb at home; it’s not too bad. I’m trying to… Didn’t we see a picture of the ceiling? Yes. Isn’t that funny.

Zane: Well, talk about it. The ceiling.

Radford: Well, it was the same ceiling as Des Moines.

Zane: As in Des Moines.

Radford: In principle. The same in principle, yes.

Zane: What about the landscaping?

Radford: Oh, the landscaping. The landscape. Most of the landscape was by nature. But we did use Sasaki, Dawson in Boston, and they did a wonderful job in the courtyard, and—wait a minute—one minute, one minute. American Can, here we go. Let’s see. Here’s the site plan. Oh, this is interesting. This is the site—this is the site before we did anything. See, and here is the steep land here. And then, here’s the final solution. And we had to build this wonderful bridge here. The landscaping really was confined—oh, there was a certain amount—obviously within this area, there had to be grading, and planting.

Zane: You’re describing the area that’s close to the building.

Radford: Within the approach roads. Within the approach roads. Let’s see if there any pictures here of the landscaping. Probably not.

100

Zane: Was American Can an easy client to deal with?

Radford: Yes. Yes. I’ve forgot—my memory’s so bad. The name of the chairman was William May. And he and Gordon became very good friends.

Zane: Yes. And then he ended up at Lincoln Center—Mr. May.

Radford: Oh, I didn’t realize that. As a trustee?

Zane: Yes.

Radford: Yes, I see. I see. I must remember to get the name of… I’m wondering whether there was any picture of the garage. I guess not. The garage is just a sixty-foot garage. You see, here’s the landscaping, which Sasaki, Dawson did. There is this—you mentioned the executives—there is this executive wing for May, and underneath that is a separate garage so they… See, they had a little road coming round here. And this is a very fine quality building; and in here, we found a Cutleaf Japanese Maple, and it was decided that was what we wanted to have. And it was found that there was an estate fairly near by, where there were many of these trees of considerable age. One was bought and deposited by helicopter. The building was built by then. And I think there were some pictures here of that. Well, this is the lobby of that executive wing, and you can see the building—this building beyond. Now, these…

Zane: The main building, you mean.

Radford: The main building.

Zane: So this tree, I guess it was a fully-grown tree.

Radford: Yes.

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Zane: And then it was deposited by helicopter.

Radford: Yes. It’s still there.

Zane: It’s still there? How has this building aged?

Radford: The last time I saw it, I took my son, who is an architect, to see it, oh, I’d say ten years ago, and it was fine. Although it’s no longer owned by American Can. And I don’t know who owns it right now. And this is an interesting detail, which came about as a result of the small building for the executives, and the long span beams on these two sides—east and west—and then girders between. These long span beams had to be post-tensioned, which means that the reinforcing cables inside the concrete are then tightened, and held by these—these, of course, are covers—but at each end, there is something like a turnbuckle on a ship. And they were tightened under pressure, which increased the strength of them. In other words, their dimension could be reduced, and it also prevents cracking. This is just a tiny detail. These things had to be exposed, they had to be accessible; so these stainless steel…

Zane: Interesting.

Radford: And it’s a very beautiful end to the thing. I think they’re everywhere. No, I think it’s only in the small building. So, that’s American Can.

Zane: Very nice.

Radford: Oh, there was one other thing about that. The floor immediately above the garage…You enter the building here, then you go down to a floor which is excavated. But here is a window to the lake, and that is the cafeteria. And the wonderful thing about that is you’re facing north; so at lunchtime, the

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light, the sunlight, is hitting the view. This is a marvelous view here. The bridge and the woods are beyond. That’s a thing which many eighteenth- century houses would do: to put the dining room, or the daytime dining room, facing north; whereas, you know, in the receptions rooms, you wanted to have the warmth. So, that was a little thing which was very nice. Nice—very nice building. Now what else are we going to do? American Can.

Zane: Well…

Radford: What time is it?

Zane: Well, let’s do one more at least, for now. What about the Noxzema Chemical Company.

Radford: Well, they make make-up.

Zane: Yes, I know. It’s way up here, on your list.

Radford: Oh, that’s much earlier than I thought. Well, here’s the plan. We first began a warehouse, which was going to be that size; and then they made it bigger. And it was a series of pre-cast concrete panels, twenty feet high, or thereabouts—five or six feet wide. And behind them are columns. There may be more photographs [of this building] inside. It’s a very straightforward office building—warehouse. But then we built an office building, which was extremely simple. There must be a detail somewhere.

Zane: It looks different to me, in some way. Well, I mean and you’re saying that it was a warehouse; that’s the first thing. But…

Radford: Very simple roof. It had a system of cooling whereby water would be sprinkled on the roof, and the evaporation would cool the building

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sufficiently. It didn’t have to be totally air-conditioned, it could be cool enough; so that was a technical aspect. What I’m trying to find, and cannot, is the relationship of these panels to the columns. I think there’s a column for every panel—a little column, you know. This is the office building.

Zane: You were commissioned first to do the warehouse, and then the…

Radford: First, do the warehouse. This is in Cockeysville, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. They had a factory—I suppose it was a nineteenth century factory—and their offices were in the factory. They moved it out to Cockeysville, in the suburbs, and then they decided they would move the whole operation. And so here we have rows of offices, an entrance, a courtyard, and a standard office building one story high. Very simple, long span—there it is. Oh, there’s a basement.

Zane: Clean. And they’re next to each other?

Radford: They are. This is the highway. You enter, and then this is the parking lot. Actually, relatively speaking, there weren’t too many employees. Let me see if there’s anything—I had a feeling there was an off-print of this building. I don’t have any off-prints.

Zane: Did you enjoy these very straightforward kinds of assignments?

Radford: Oh yes. Yes.

Zane: And how long would something like that simple warehouse take you to conceptualize?

Radford: Well, generally speaking, from the time we were hired—oh, this is too general, but—the time we were hired to the time they’d put a shovel in the ground, it might be six months.

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Zane: That’s for this particular client? Or are you talking in generalities.

Radford: For a building of this magnitude. Now, Connecticut General’s a much bigger building. I think we spent about a year before they started building. And then the building took four years to build. I don’t know how long Noxzema took. It was a fairly short construction period. What I’m trying to see if there’s any—when was Noxzema finished? 1961.

Zane: Well, when you and Gordon would sit down together to come up with whatever the conceptual plan would be for a particular building, were you always looking for, you know, some innovation in each design?

Radford: Not always. And in fact—it’s interesting you say that—there is a series of couples. For example, the Reynolds Building, which followed immediately on Connecticut General, has many of the elements which were developed in Connecticut General. And then running ahead: some of those elements are in American Can. And yet, in American Can, the structure, which had grown out of other things—Brussels, which I was not involved in, and Des Moines—Weidlinger was the engineer we used then, and he had a great influence on Gordon. They became very good friends. And they both worked very well together.

Zane: But I guess the question I’m asking is really what the relationship is, or should be, between function and necessity; and something larger than that, which is, would it be art?

Radford: Well, in some ways, there are four pillars: the site, the program, the structure and the mechanical systems, and the cost. Now, that is a sort of soup. The difference between an ordinary building and a good building is that someone makes that into a work of art. But the elements are still there. You still have a site, you still have foundations, you still have lights and air.

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Zane: So, what you’re saying is that largely you start from that more pedestrian point of view.

Radford: You start from the program. You start from the program. Now, in some cases—take the story of American Can-the idea of bridging that gap came very early, and that was dramatic. But that’s a very dramatic building. That was not true in Noxzema. Noxzema, as you point out, is a very straightforward building. It’s a nice building. And apparently…

Zane: You can’t find it.

Radford: My colleagues didn’t think highly enough of it to put it in this book [an SOM catalogue of buildings built in that era].

[Interruption]

Zane: Okay Roger, you can address—maybe we’ll do the FAA project, and then we can take a break.

Radford: The Federal Aviation Agency. They wanted a building, which was called NAFEC, the National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center.

Zane: Which meant what?

Radford: It’s largely concerned with flight safety, and the techniques of what people do in the tower, relating to the aircraft. And they had many elements, some of which…

Zane: This would be a place where people would come to be trained?

Radford: Well, they did research there.

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Zane: They did research. I see.

Radford: In fact, there was something in the paper the other day about NAFEC, maybe to do with what they’re going to do about air traffic this weekend [Thanksgiving Weekend 2007], and NAFEC got involved in some capacity.

Zane: Oh, and that’s when they decided to give up a couple of—

Radford: Give up the military air space, yes. The original—oh God, this is complicated.

Zane: Well, maybe you should not look at it, and just talk to me about it.

Radford: There’s something missing. The original program was for a lab building. And that building had to have a boiler house, of course. It’s a big building. And they also wanted a hangar. This is in Atlantic City, and it’s near the Atlantic City Municipal Airport. The first thing we built—talk about a pedestrian building—was the hangar. Here’s the hangar.

Zane: But that’s hardly pedestrian looking. It’s beautiful.

Radford: And the hangar—this is the tall space for the planes, and then all the ancillary stuff, of which there’s an enormous amount-workshops and offices-we piled up in four stories here. And on this side—I wonder if there’s a picture of this side, cause there’s an amusing thing that came later. No, maybe it’s not here. On the far side, we had to put in a door for emergency exit, because once these doors are closed…

Zane: There was no way to get out.

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Radford: There was no—the distance—I mean you could get out over here, but the distances were too great. So I think we put in two doors. Many years later, John McPhee wrote an article about some experimental pilot who went into this hangar, and McPhee said, “He walked into this enormous hangar, through this little tiny door, and he was like a mouse going home.” I’ve always remembered the reference. One of the problems with this building is that this was subject, of course, to Congressional approval. Our client, incidentally, was Najeeb Halaby, whose daughter eventually became…

Zane: Queen Noor.

Radford: Queen Noor.

Zane: Wasn’t he the head of Pan Am? But at this point, he was the head of the FAA?

Radford: Well, at the time, he was the head of FAA; and he was greatly involved with all the people who ran airlines, you know: [Juan] Tripp, and all the others.

Zane: Juan Tripp.

Radford: Maybe he moved over to that. And funny enough: that was a case where he and Gordon hit it off. They really hit it off. We had endless difficulties getting a contract out of the government. And then we designed this large building, and they decided they couldn’t build all at once, so we divided it all into phases. And then, the only thing they built first—they built the hangar—was the boiler house. And I remember when I first got involved in this building, one of the mechanical engineers, a man called John Hennessey, who had been around a long time, he and I were driving to Atlantic City, and for some reason, he said, “You know, this is a very large project for the government.” And he said, “I’ve been involved in cases where we would design a building and a boiler house, and the only thing

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that got built was the boiler house.” We all laughed at this. And that’s exactly what happened. Many years later, they hired another firm who did a different building, which I’ve never seen. It is there. I mean, they are doing the work down there. And most of the lab work was to do with sophisticated computers. They had flight simulators; they built a whole mock-up of an air traffic control center, and were experimenting with the various…

Zane: When you did this…

Radford: This—I’m trying to see where it is.

Zane: It’s here. It says…

Radford: 1965. See, that’s forty years ago.

Zane: But, in the end, that beautiful building that you showed me wasn’t built.

Radford: The hangar was built. The hangar was built, but not the building, nor the lab. Now, the one thing which maybe—the stadium… Let’s show you the stadium [at University of Massachusetts]. And that’s—in this e-mail, which I don’t think you’ve got, I said that there were sixteen thousand seats, a hundred dollars a seat. And this was…

Zane: That’s a lot for a public institution. Or not?

Radford: Well, not for construction—not for the construction. No, no. Well, I think we just—you know, here are these fins. I wonder if there’s a plan on this. Most of these photographs were taken by Ezra Stoller, or by his helper, who now has probably taken over the business. Nope, that’s it. Now, maybe that’s in here. When was that finished? 1965. That ought to be in here.

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Zane: Yes, and as you told me last time, this was a very unusual design.

Radford: The fascinating thing, in a way, was that we were hired by the engineer. But it didn’t make any difference, since we worked with him so often that it was fine. Now, again I’m afraid, it’s a building which my colleagues didn’t think was sufficiently exciting.

Zane: Here’s a question. And then maybe we can stop for a bit. You know, the responsiveness of different kinds of clients. We’ve gone through a number of buildings; you have described this trouble with the government, in getting a contract, and sometimes you end up with maybe the government people trying to start to cut corners, and thereby compromise the design. Is that a fair statement?

Radford: I think so. I was lucky in my career. I think the FAA was the only building I was involved in which was involved with the federal government. The buildings we did in Jeddah, of course, were involved with the government of Saudi Arabia; it’s somewhat different. But I can give you an example— which is a building I had nothing to do with—in Washington: the Hirshhorn Museum, this big round doughnut. And it had to go out under government regulations to competitive bidding. As soon as the successful bidder gets the drawings, and gets the contract, his lawyers go through it to find loopholes, and there are always errors of some sort. So, these things are a constant battle. And, in a way, it would be nice not to have to work for the federal government, which is sad, because, you know, it’s important. Now, I.M. Pei got the Mellon Wing of the National Gallery done. Well, I guess he got it because Mellon had more money than Hirshhorn. Hirshhorn, of course, gave that building, so…

Zane: So, these might be kinds of commissions that, if you’re a really successful firm, you might wish to avoid? Is that fair?

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Radford: In the case of Hirshhorn, Hirshhorn was a collector. Gordon was a collector. And they were both Russians. [laughs] I don’t know whether Gordon knew Hirshhorn. As I say, it was done by two different people, both at my level. But they were good friends. Hirshhorn decided he wanted to give this thing, and he got [Lyndon B.] Johnson, who was the president at that time, to agree to it. No, that was a building, which—I don’t know; I think everyone would like to do that building. And of course, ironically, that led to another building, which Gordon did-the Johnson Library in Texas. And my memory of talking to my colleagues who worked on it, they had the same sort of problem there. Of course, you have these problems in the construction of all buildings. Mistakes are discovered, people cut corners, someone gets three bids, and none of them is good enough, and so forth.

Zane: But it’s a different issue when the artistic aspect starts to become compromised.

Radford: Yes. Yes. Well, if I remember rightly, I think Hirshhorn is now exposed concrete drum. I think, originally, that was supposed to have travertine, like Lincoln Center. And I think that had to be cut out. But, in a way, these parts shouldn’t be in this interview, because I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

Zane: Let’s stop. What do you think?

Radford: Is it time for lunch?

Zane: Yes. Well it’s time for a break, anyway.

[interruption for lunch]

Zane: Okay, resuming.

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Radford: I think the last thing you said was were some buildings, which were innovative—you didn’t use that word—which were special in their design. And then I said, Well, there tended to be series of buildings; and I talked about Connecticut General leading to Reynolds, and in some ways leading to American Can. And 140 Broadway—which we were very proud of—led to a whole series of buildings for the Tishmans. And one is 919 Third Avenue, which is above P.J. Clarke. And then there was another building, 1166 Sixth Avenue, which is really very similar [to 919]. They’re both rectangular buildings with a central core, and the same sort of façade; but, as it happened, you know, not quite as sophisticated as 140 Broadway was. It’s very difficult to explain why.

Zane: And did that have to do with the client?

Radford: I don’t think that would be fair to say. It has to do with the circumstances of the site. That’s a very difficult question. In fact, the client was rather an understanding client. But these were speculative buildings, and so was 140 Broadway, for that matter. I remember once—and this, in a way, is not a fair thing to have in this, but I’ll tell you anyway—our office was designing the Chase Building, which a group of people were admiring. And we also were doing a building for the Equitable Company on Sixth Avenue, which was not such a striking building. And I remember—who was the author who wrote The Making of the President? Johnson and Kennedy and Nixon? [Making of the President, by Theodore H. White]

Zane: Oh, yes. It’ll come to me. I can see the book in front of me.

Radford: He and I were at a dinner party, and he found out that I was an architect, and he said, “Tell me, your office did these two buildings. How could I be sure, if I wanted a building, that you would give me a building like Chase, or a building like Equitable?” And I said, “Well that’s a very difficult question; but you know, and it really came down to who was involved.”

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Zane: And by that, you mean the whole cast of characters?

Radford: Bunshaft was involved in one; he was not in the other. Now, I don’t want to—I think they’re all dead now—but I don’t want to mention who the other people were. It may have been the client, too, because Rockefeller was an exceptional client. And we always discovered that the best result is if the client and the architect have a rapport. And if the client is interested in the project—many clients are not interested in the project; they just need a building-they assign it to somebody else, one of their staff, to get a building built. But, if you have a client who’s interested, and if there’s a rapport with the architect, then there’s a good chance you get a good building. And that’s certainly true—and in a totally different circumstance—with Louis Kahn, and the man who discovered the vaccine for polio.

Zane: [Dr. Jonas] Salk?

Radford: Salk. Kahn and Salk built this building in California, in La Jolla, a fabulous building. And they became great friends. Now where are we?

Zane: Well, you were going to talk about these two buildings: 919 Third Avenue and 1166 Avenue of the Americas.

Radford: Well, I wonder if I’ve got anything on them. [looking through a book] Well, it’s not here. Let’s see what I’ve got.

Zane: It’s 1970.

Radford: I know, but it’s not there. I have a funny feeling that it wasn’t published much—wasn’t published much. It’s a fine building, though. But the point of that story was that those three buildings-140 Broadway, 919 Third Avenue

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and 1166 Avenue of the Americas-they’re cousins. Shall I put it that way? They’re cousins, in design.

Zane: You mean conceptually.

Radford: Cousins in design.

Zane: And your point is that that just sort of comes; it’s like…

Radford: And, of course, technically, there were tremendous similarities. They were the same; they have elevators; they have stairs; they have bathrooms; they have a lobby.

Zane: Well, will you tell me the New York Stock Exchange story?

Radford: We were hired to do a new building [for them], and that never took place.

Zane: And the building was supposed to be where?

Radford: It was in various places. One was on the East River, at the end of Wall Street, where there is now a helicopter pad. One was to be in the underground park in front of U.S. Steel. They kept moving around. In fact, I think our office is still working on schemes for them! But eventually, we worked a long time on this; I guess they got to know us. The first thing that we actually did for them. Here is the old building. Here’s the entrance, here’s the main trading floor, and what they call the garage. Well, there was a building here; and these are the elevators of the building—nothing to do with us, except a minor one—and we built this so-called “Blue Room,” because the walls were painted blue. And we made these enormous specialist positions. I suppose that’s how they still do business down there. And these were for the specialists; these were for the brokers; and these are the squad boys, running around. And it was an exciting project—very technical. Very technical. We

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had to learn not only about the functions of the men, and the women— although there were no women at the beginning—but also the equipment, which was rapidly changing, as we were working.

Zane: Well, this was when?

Radford: In 1965.

Zane: Well, the sheet of projects I have says that this was completed in 1969.

Radford: 1969. Sorry. 1965 is when we were hired to do the new building. So, we probably started this a couple of years later.

Zane: Well, this actually did, you know, occur right in the middle of tremendous changes for the stock exchange, including what they called the paper crunch. It was just getting to be impossible for them to handle trades, because the volume was too big. And they didn’t have the technology. So I assume that your specialist stations were all outfitted technologically?

Radford: Oh, yes. I don’t have a picture—this is—these were—the upper level—you know, it’d have a counter, then there’d be a level of screens up there, which were beginning to be put over here. I can’t imagine why they need a building anymore. They just needed a big computer. We did one other thing, which I wasn’t really involved in. There was something called a clearinghouse for stocks, which I don’t think people do anymore; I think it’s all done electronically now. But they had an institution for that, which they put in a building on the East River, and that was a big job, in terms of volume, for the office. So, we’ve been doing work for them for a long time. But this was very interesting.

Zane: Because?

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Radford: Well, it was an interesting project. Now, let’s see…

Zane: The colors are just to delineate the functions?

Radford: Well, these are the specialists. These are the specialists’ clerks, and these are the booths for the brokers.

Zane: You really had to know how it was working, in order to be able to…

Radford: I had a colleague, and we spent two weeks on the floor, talking to all these workers. And it was very interesting—very interesting. The specialists, and the brokers, and then we would watch trades happening. And these were the days of odd lots. Are there no odd lots anymore? You probably know more than I do. But there were two firms who did odd lots, and I don’t think either of them exists today. There was very little architecture in this. There was product design—product design.

Zane: Product design. Well, also—you know, also the issue of knowing what the business is, in order to be able to provide, you know, the best possible…

Radford: You really have to do… And that brings me back, way back. This is this book by [Alfred] Roth, The New Architecture. And I find I’d bought it when it was issued, so I… And here is the Boots [Boots Cash Chemist Building] factory; here it is [pointing]. This is the engineer. Here is a railway line; and here is a canal, which runs into the Trent River. And this—there were many buildings—and this is the building which we’re going to talk about, the so- called Wets Building. And here’s this plan. And let’s see, there’s a very interesting section. These mushroom structures. Here are these thousands of columns. But here it is again. And totally glazed, all the way round; and then inside—this is a sort of section—Oh here’s the real section. See there are three floors—in this case, four floors; and the raw materials would come in and be manufactured in relatively small units, because they weren’t very

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big. And then they were taken to a packing hall, which is this big packing hall. This is under construction. But this building was tremendously significant to me. It was a very significant building. And then here is one of the earliest devices to wash the windows. But the thing that’s striking, from an architectural point of view, are the columns. And here’s a diagram of the structure. So, you can imagine, when Roth turned up at Harvard, and began to teach me, I was…

Zane: Exactly.

Radford: Here it is at night.

Zane: Beautiful. It is beautiful. Look at how worn that book is.

Radford: Yes.

Zane: Let’s do one more thing today. Let’s see.

Radford: Well, there’s one building here, when I was the principal designer: Joint Banking Center.

Zane: But before we do that, let me just see 919 Third, which you didn’t really talk too much about.

Radford: The only story about that was very sad. There was a fire.

Zane: Let’s go back to do that. Before we go to the big one, which maybe we’d be better off saving for next time. Do you have any stories on the 919 building?

Radford: Well, the story’s a rather sad story. It so happened that Gordon and I were in a taxi, coming up from some meeting downtown. We were driving up Third Avenue, and there was smoke coming out of this building. The building was

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built, but only the first several floors were occupied. Above the occupied floors were workmen, and they were still working. And there was some accident with paint and a blowtorch. I don’t know what caused it. And this fire began. In those days, the sophistication of the relation of firemen and elevators, and safety, was embryonic. The firemen went into the building, and they used the elevator to look for the fire. In other words, they knew that it wasn’t in the occupied floors; so they went up to the next floor, and as they got to the floor, they opened the door: no fire. And they went up: no fire. Then they went [to another floor] and as they opened the door, the fire came in, and they were all killed, four or five firemen. So: very sad. And as a result, now, you’ve probably seen on the side of the elevators, these fire controls—the keys—if they’re doing this searching for the fire, the doors open a tiny bit, and you can see flames, and then they can close the elevator door, and they know what to do. So, that’s not exactly a happy story, but it developed the fire suppression system. Now, that building was not, at that time, sprinklered. You did not have to have a sprinklered building in New York if it was fireproof. Now you do.

Zane: You have to have both.

Radford: You have to have both. Yes. And rightly. And rightly.

Zane: Have they gone back and put sprinklers into buildings that didn’t have to have them? Yes, I guess, by code…

Radford: Probably. Yes. The laws vary. You know: difficult to have retroactive laws; but if you make modifications, then you have to bring it up to code. Whether that building ever did, I don’t know.

Zane: Actually, when I think about it—this is just an aside—I live in a big tower, and it was built before they needed to have sprinklers, and we don’t have them. So.

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Radford: Let’s hope it’s a fireproof building.

Zane: Thank you. It’s supposed to be.

Radford: Now, you had some questions.

Zane: Well, I just had a few other things listed here. You know, these are buildings that you didn’t even put—I don’t think you put on your list you gave me, but the SOM office provided me with.

Radford: Who is they? Our office in New York, or Chicago?

Zane: I don’t know the answer to that. I believe it was New York.

Radford: Okay.

Zane: I’m just looking. Senior Interior Design Architect for El Mercurio, which is a newspaper, right?

Radford: Oh, in Chile. Yes. In Santiago. That didn’t get built. What did they call me? Senior Interior Designer?

Zane: Design Architect is what it says.

Radford: I suppose I would have been. I wanted to talk about the Joint Banking Center, in Kuwait. Our office in New York had a determined policy not to enter competitions, for the reason that if the architect designs a building, and then meets the client, the architect in entrenched. You know. “This is my building. You know.”

Zane: Wait, say that again.

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Radford: If the architect—if you enter a competition, and you win, by that time, you are intellectually attached to the submitted plan of this building. And in a way, it produces an initial conflict. And the classic case was, a few years before this, the firm refused to enter a competition for Johns Manville. All the partners had agreed that they would not—Johns Manville had asked us to do this building—and the firm refused. However, times changed. When this Kuwait job came along, there had been the oil crisis. And the people in Kuwait bought three banks—by our standards, small banks in volume and in size, not necessarily in volume. They wanted to build what they called a Joint Banking Center, but they wanted three independent buildings. And this was a rather small site. And there were three firms, I remember: [Philip] Johnson was one; the Architects’ Collaborative, who’d done a lot of work in Kuwait, and sort of thought they were going to win, was the second; and then us.

Zane: Who were the principals in Architects’ Collaborative?

Radford: At that time, I can’t remember. That was the outgrowth of Gropius’ firm. I used to be able to rattle off the firms; I can’t remember now. And so I was assigned to this. Believing we were not going to win, you might as well see what you can do.

Zane: Did you travel? Did you go there first?

Radford: No.

Zane: So, when that happens: What did they provide you with?

Radford: The description is here. We had the site plan. This is all our stuff: the contract and our proposal. I guess, we did have—I had a colleague who had worked in Kuwait, so maybe he produced it. And here were the existing

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buildings; and here’s the site. This is due north. I actually designed this building [to face north]-my thought was that in this climate, north was the way to face, because you don’t want sun. The backs of the buildings were solid. And these are tiny buildings, in area. So these are stairs and elevators, and then windows. And that—that is the basic design. Here’s the front. And they wanted a—no, I guess we developed this canopy. I think there had to be a banking hall, or something. This—it’s like a cheese grater. These are concrete. And these were the air-conditioning devices, rather, air intakes and exhausts. And here’s the back again. Here are the plans. There was a garage underneath. Here’s the street level. And these—oh, this must be early; because these were the banking halls. I think that changed, subsequently.

Zane: And you had three of them.

Radford: This—since we’d never seen these people, these showed different arrangements within the floor.

Zane: Each one of these three. Right. Same shape, but different…

Radford: It was the same building—exactly the same building. This showed offices and the support group; this shows big conference rooms; this shows a different variation. And this is the design of the canopy. Now, to our great surprise, we won.

Zane: I want to back up to something you said. This was your first go on your own?

Radford: First go on my own. I was given this job, and told to go with it. A curious thing happened: When we got to Kuwait—the building, I think, is built like this; but the owner was very insistent that the floors be recognized. So he insisted—now I wonder if I’ve got a section somewhere…

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Zane: In other words, from the outside, if you were looking, you could see…

Radford: From the outside. You know, instead of just one surface. I thought that was quite dramatic, but he didn’t. Where the hell’s the section? The structure of this building were these T’s going this way; so he just added another one outside. And pushed these—it was fine—he pushed these stairs forward. However…

Zane: No, he asked you to do it.

Radford: Yeah, but they were our [client]. We did. We had to. However, at this time— I went there twice, I think, when we were discussing these things we were doing this big building in Jeddah for the Jeddah International Airport, which had three elements. One became the most famous, the pilgrimage terminal for the Haj pilgrims. One was a civilian base for the Saudi airline, which was done in Chicago. And one was an air force base for the Saudi Air Force, which we did. This complex of buildings in Saudi Arabia was so large that I was taken off the Kuwait job, and put onto Jeddah, which was fine. I assume the building got built more or less the way we described it.

Zane: So you’ve never gone there to see it?

Radford: I’ve never gone to see it. The area—after the—at one point, during the first war in Kuwait, I thought I saw a picture from the air, of this building damaged; but I don’t think it was damaged; because I spoke to a friend later, who lived in Kuwait; and she said, No, she didn’t think it was. Now, so that’s the story of that. And that was an interesting thing.

Zane: Interesting because?

Radford: Well there were two other interesting things: the judges of the competition were [I.M.] Pei and [Paul] Rudolph. And, of course, they didn’t know who

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the architects were. They were secret, you see. But when they found it was our office, they were totally surprised. So, anyway.

Zane: Because…?

Radford: It was not what they would have expected our office to produce.

Zane: Well, that brings up an interesting question, a question that I had sort of circled to ask before, but maybe I’ll ask it now. What would that have been, that they had expected? And how was this different from that?

Radford: Well, I think they knew the work our office had done. Remember: they had no idea who had designed this building. Johnson had done—it’s unfair to criticize—he had done three different shapes: a round, a triangle, and a square, all in different materials. I think one was pewter; one was copper; one… [laughs] The Architects’ Collaborative had a workman-like, but banal, building. And I think the thing that was amusing here was the fact that they wanted three identical buildings, and that’s what they got [from me]. So, we certainly met the requirement.

Zane: But was there an SOM look?

Radford: No, not really. People say there is; but there—well, you’ve seen all these things. If you think of—and these are only the things that I was involved with—they’re only a quarter [of what was done]. And, if you think of the [John] Hancock Building, and the American Republic, the Library [at Lincoln Center], Marine Midland, the football stadium: they’re all different. They’re all different. And now, it’s true that the standard commercial office buildings tend to be the same, or similar—not the same, but similar- because the problem is similar. In fact, I think one of the reasons so many of these office buildings are really not very attractive is that people are struggling to

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make them different, and there really is no difference. But then, equally, if the whole city was 140 Broadways, that would be boring too.

Zane: Do you like the Frank Gehry building [in New York City]?

Radford: I don’t like any Frank Gehry building. [laughs] He’s a sculptor—and a wonderful impresario. I heard a broadcast, and he’s a very attractive man, judging from the television interview, but…

Zane: Well, we’ll save that. That’s for the next time, which is the philosophical stuff. How did you feel when you were pulled off this project? Which was yours, and you were given it…

Radford: I was a little bit saddened, but what I had to do [in Jeddah] was so important that it was fine. It was fine.

Zane: Well, so I guess, since we’re there [the Jeddah project], let’s talk about that. Do we have enough time to do that?

Radford: Well maybe—it’s a big project.

Zane: Who took over the Joint Banking Center?

Radford: A fellow called McCarthy, Michael McCarthy. And he died some years ago. He was younger than I am, but he died quite young. And he did a wonderful job in the interiors, and particularly, in the banking halls. We hadn’t done much, in the submission, we hadn’t done much on that. We indicated what might happen. But he did a very nice job. And he exploited, or tried to exploit, Muslim designs into some of the decoration. He subsequently went on to design the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington.

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Zane: It’s funny though, that you say that about the interiors’ design elements. Some of these design elements, like the top of the canopy, to me looks almost like, you know, the prayer mats they put out.

Radford: We were trying. I knew less about it than he did. He was very good at that.

Zane: But that struck me immediately when I saw it. But those were things that they hadn’t asked for, that you were just injecting?

Radford: Well, in the initial competition to decide who the architect should be, I suppose we were paid some nominal sum to do this. Now, what do we have on Jeddah? Oh, my God.

Zane: Well, do you want to leave that for next time?

Radford: Maybe.

Zane: Why don’t we do that.

Radford: Now, a thing happened at that point: Jeddah—without getting into it-Jeddah was completed in 1980. We started in 1976. The main terminal was a very interesting building. And Gordon and an engineer partner in the Chicago office, called Fazlur Khan, was the engineer. And it was a great collaborative. And this is a stressed fabric structure. I’ll show you pictures. However, this was really Gordon’s last building. Well, that’s not true: there were buildings—it was the last building he and I did together. And then he retired. And really, after he retired, my role in the firm changed. I had been a very close ally, and I hope supporter—friend—and other people were taking over the firm; and to a degree, my role after that was less significant, and certainly less enjoyable. I did several buildings—two buildings—with a younger designer called Raul de Armas, whom I’d known for many years; and we worked well together. It was not quite the same relationship, but we

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produced two buildings. One was for Irving Trust, downtown; and one was for Shearson Lehman, on the West Side.

Zane: Where? Not the one [Shearson Lehman Building] way downtown?

Radford: Yes. It’s an operations building. I can’t remember the name of the street. There’s a street called Hubert Street.

Zane: And the Irving Trust Building is…

Radford: The Irving Trust is—I can show you that. That’s in here. Irving Trust.

Zane: There’s the Shearson Lehman/American Express Building, but that’s down at the World Financial Center.

Radford: Oh, that’s [Cesar] Pelli’s buildings, on the water.

Zane: Right.

Radford: That’s their office building. This was really a computer building. It was an operations building. It’s amazing how computerization has changed. This was finished in 1986. The top floor of that building is eighteen feet high, totally filled with enormous computers. And special generators to keep them cool, and to keep them going if the power failed; they don’t have any of that anymore. One thing I’d better do for next time is to go through these materials so I can find things. But that’s what I wanted to say. My role somewhat changed. And then, at a certain point—and I don’t know how much this should go in the final transcript, but I’m going to tell you—at a certain point, the firm decided it wanted to retire everybody at sixty. And I was then fifty-nine, which they should have known. So, two or three of us were asked to retire. And I didn’t want to retire. I didn’t actually take them

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to court, but I got hold of a lawyer, and the firm didn’t quite know what to do. They were enjoined from firing me—firing’s too harsh a word; but…

Zane: From forcing you to retire.

Radford: Forcing me to retire. And it was a really unpleasant time. For a few months, not much happened; and then…

Zane: What does mean? So they didn’t really give you anything to do?

Radford: No, they gave me things to do. In fact, we were working on a new job expanding the Dulles Airport, in Washington. And I worked on that assiduously. And I remember at one point, going down—in fact, going down with David Childs, who was in charge of that job-and I gave a presentation on what we were talking about. And as we walked out, David said to me, “Why did you write that letter?” So I said, “Well, why did you fire me?” And he said, “No, we didn’t fire you. No, we didn’t fire you.” Anyway, it was a limbo. But the Jeddah job, the partner in charge of that, a man called Gordon Wildermuth—he and I were very good friends, and we got to know each other very well on the Jeddah job. But by this time, he had moved to Chicago. So he called one day and said, “The Chicago office has a job in London. Would you and Jennifer [Radford] like to go over there, and work over there on it?” And to cut a long story short, for a whole year, I went back and forth from here to Chicago, working on that, and then we went to London for three years, for Canary Wharf.

Zane: Canary Wharf. That was—what’s his name’s project, right? The guy from Toronto?

Radford: Yes. Now, what was his name?

Zane: Reichmann.

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Radford: Reichmann! Oh, gosh, I’m glad you remembered. There were three brothers, or two brothers. The original job came through a man called Ware Travelstead. Now, Ware Travelstead was great big man, maybe he was a financial man, but he got into development. And we had done a building for him in New York called Tower 49, on Forty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. And it was a good relationship between the firm, and Gordon Wildermuth and Travelstead and I; we were good friends. Travelstead saw that these piers, which were in the heart of the old London docks, were now abandoned, because of container ships. The container port was miles from the Thames, at Felixstowe. And these areas were undeveloped. So, he also saw that the city of London, which is very confined, had regulations which, at that time, prevented tall buildings. He had the idea that he would sponsor a satellite city out there, which is what he did. And we worked for him, I would say, for two years on this project, and then he sold it to the Reichmanns. And, rather like with 140 Broadway, the Reichmanns inherited us. We had done an enormous amount of work with the City of London and the government, and with all the utility companies: the distribution of water, gas—all these things. And they really had no choice but to keep us, particularly for the ground part. And then out of this grew different buildings, some of which we designed, some of which we didn’t. I never felt that the Reichmanns were very happy with us. Maybe I’m wrong. I basically worked on the substructure. And I thought the buildings looked pretty awful. They were Post-Modern buildings, some designed by our office. The only decent building, in my opinion, was done by Pei, a very simple building. I gather it’s been a great success.

Zane: You haven’t seen it.

Radford: I’ve never seen it. No.

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Zane: I mean, if memory serves, I think the Reichmanns—I think they went bankrupt over it.

Radford: Oh, they got in a lot of trouble. They got in a lot of trouble. And I’ve forgotten what happened with them. Next week, I’ll try and produce a plan—there’s a big tower in the middle of the project, which Pelli did. And Pelli had done a building for them in Toronto. And he got on with the Reichmanns; he thought they were great clients, which was fine. But I heard at one point they had to sell some of their holdings, and I don’t know what became of them.

Zane: And I think they were originally supposed to be—or they were at that same time—maybe involved with something that was going on down at Battery Park City, but they had to pull out, I think.

Radford: Oh, that could be. Because Pelli was involved in that. And I don’t know who financed that.

Zane: I think it was the Canary Wharf thing that financially brought them down, if I remember correctly, which I don’t always.

Radford: Do you think they’re still around?

Zane: I don’t know the answer to that.

Radford: It’s rather like Keith Funston. For years, I’ve been trying to remember the name of the Reichmanns.

Zane: Well, that’s it.

Radford: Well, that’s…

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Zane: All right. Have you had enough, do you think?

Radford: Well, if you do.

Zane: It’s a good place to stop. Although I did have one other question I wanted to ask you. How old was Gordon when he retired?

Radford: He was seventy. But the partners weren’t forcing themselves to retire, at that point. Although later, I’m told, they tried to introduce this across the board.

Zane: The reasoning behind it being what? Just to make room for younger people?

Radford: Younger—younger people moving up. Now, Childs must be over seventy. And he’s still working away, although, technically, I think you’ll find he is what the lawyers call “of counsel.” He doesn’t run the firm. Well, he may run the firm, but, nominally, he’s not the managing partner. [Returning to photo of the Haj building in Jeddah] Each one of these tents is the size of the Pantheon: forty-five meters. The pilgrims arrive on an air-conditioned airplane; they go through an air-conditioned customs and immigration. And then they come out into this space, where they may have to wait hours, if not days, to get on the busses to go to Mecca. They cook their meals; they sleep. They need shelter from the sun. So we developed this tent, essentially; and not only did we have a tent, but we had enormous towers which produced air-they were not air-conditioned towers, but they circulated air. I wonder if there’s a picture? Oh, here they are. And you can see these towers. And they would blow air out, and try and make these people comfortable. And that was a fascinating job.

Zane: Which you’re going to tell me lots more about.

Radford: I’ll tell you about it next time.

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[Tape 5: Side A]

Zane: Let me say that this is an interview with Roger Radford for the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Oral History. It is the 4th of January 2008. And we are at Hamden, Connecticut. My first question to you: We had said we were going to start with a discussion of the project in Jeddah, followed by what went on at Canary Wharf, and you’ll tie it up as you see fit.

Radford: Okay.

Zane: How does that sound?

Radford: That sounds fine. Are you ready?

Zane: I’m ready.

Radford: I’d like to back up a little. When I first went to the [SOM] office in 1953, the very first project I was working on—Connecticut General—one of the requirements by the owner was that the building be air-conditioned. Now, nowadays that would be unnecessary to point out.

Zane: Because they always are.

Radford: But, only a few years before, in 1948, our office had done an apartment building, Manhattan House, in East 66th Street, where it was decided not to air-condition the building, or the apartments, but merely to provide enough electric power so that the tenants could put in their own air-conditioning. The result is that as soon as it was finished, this blossom of little air- conditioning units popped out of all the windows.

Zane: And ruined the whole design?

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Radford: Well, it affected it. Now, in fact, the first fully air-conditioned building in New York was the U.N. [United Nations]. And the second was Lever House. And Lever House was finished in 1952, and we started Connecticut General in ’53. Well, the consequence of this, to me, is that, following Gropius’ maxim-that the architect is the leader of the team—suddenly we had a team of much bigger proportions. We not only had a structural engineer, we had a mechanical engineer, an electrical [engineer]; and it meant, as far as my own career was concerned, as I got more experienced and more senior, that I became the sort of coordinator and collaborator with all these different engineers, many of whom became good friends. Now, that leads to another aspect. [adjusting the microphone] In the New York office, which was a big office-and we were all architects, and there was one landscape architect-we hired the engineers independently in the city. And that was because the finest engineers were attracted to New York, and to me, this had two advantages. First: they worked for other architects, so there was a cross- fertilization of ideas; and secondly, of course, we didn’t have to have such a large office, because engineering is a very—or was then; it may not be now, with computers—was then a very labor-intensive occupation. Now, the Chicago office—and the relevance of this will come in later—they chose, either because there weren’t enough good engineers in Chicago, although I doubt that, or because the partners wanted to do it that way, they chose to have their own in-house engineers. The result was that the Chicago office was always very big, in terms of manpower. Now, that had, in my opinion, plusses and minuses. One of the minuses was that in a big office where you have ranking and seniority, you may get the situation where the engineer is a senior person and may pull rank over the architect, and there are all sorts of difficulties that may arise. That’s not totally hypothetical, because many people complained to me about this situation. However, it had its plusses. Faz Khan was one of the finest engineers of his generation. He designed both the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Building, whose design, really, depended on his structure. So, you can take the rough with the smooth. Now, when we come to these two big projects, Jeddah and Canary Wharf,

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the similarities are largely in the scale, but there was another similarity, in that they both used both offices.

Zane: Now, just finish here. Scale, meaning…

Radford: Magnitude. You know, thousands of… I, unfortunately, have no memory for the physical size of these things, but they were both very large. In fact, let me back up on Jeddah. In 1973, when the oil embargo was announced, the Saudi government decided to use its profits for three things: transportation, including air transportation; hospitals; and education, including a new university. And they did, in fact, initiate three airports: Jeddah, on the west coast; Riyadh, in the middle—the capital; and an airport on the gulf, Dhahran. And we were invited to do the Jeddah International Airport. Now, the old airport in Jeddah was in the middle of town, was totally surrounded by buildings. They had already developed and established a site several miles towards the sea, very near the Red Sea. And Ed Stone had designed, and was under construction, a civilian terminal. The reason I say civilian is that the unique element in Jeddah is that every year two million plus pilgrims arrive for the Haj. And the Haj had to be provided for. Now, these pilgrims arrive in an air-conditioned plane; they get off into an air- conditioned building, where they do immigration and passports, and that; and then they’re sent out into somewhere, where they have to shelter for several days before they get on their topless busses to go off to Mecca and Medina. And it was estimated that the time that this terminal would be occupied by pilgrims was probably two months every year. The Haj moves according to some other calendar; sometimes it’s in the summer, sometimes in the winter.

Zane: But it’s for about two months every year is what you’re saying.

Radford: About two months. The actual Haj is one day, the peak day, but people get there. They also—and I always was amused by this—we were always told

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that it’s not wasted because every year we have an influx of teachers from abroad, and they use this terminal to come and to go. Now, not only did this project involve the Haj terminal, there was to be a base for the Royal Saudi Air Force. There was to be a maintenance base for Saudia, the national airline. There was to be a quarantine hospital, and that was not a light matter, because many of these pilgrims were sick. In fact, sometimes their sicknesses were not revealed by their foreign governments. There was to be some housing. And of course, the whole site, which was very large, had to have civil engineering roads, and so forth. Both our Chicago and New York offices were involved. And the division was this: In New York, we took on the Haj, the air force base, and the hospital, I think. Chicago did all the engineering, and the Saudia maintenance base, which was a very big building, and the civil engineering to do with drainage and so forth. That meant, as far as I was concerned, and I was involved in both the Haj and the air force base, that I spent a lot of time working with the Chicago engineers. And despite my previous remarks, it worked out fine. [laughter] And so, in a way, it was the culmination of a lot of experience I’d had, and I was sort of proud of the way the buildings I’d been involved in that we had integrated all these things, and produced elegant buildings. So, that’s the story of Jeddah.

Zane: You went there frequently?

Radford: I went there during the design development, particularly to talk to the air force—several times. Once the design had been approved, and the drawings were made, I only went two or three times. The construction was done by a German company called Hochtief. And we had at one point, I remember, a whole group of us went there to review all the working drawings for the different projects against comments and criticisms and cutbacks, which other people had made. And we were there for several days doing that. I never actually saw the finished buildings. [laughter]

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Zane: The client was the royal family?

Radford: Essentially, yes. Our man who ran the thing was Gordon Wildermuth. He was in charge of the project, from an administrative point of view. And a group of us went off to Riyadh, and met with the current king, and the heir apparent, and the minister of transportation. I can’t remember his name. And they were all members of the royal family, and they gave approval. Now, this project essentially ended just after the early 1980s. At one point there was a big target: It’s got to be finished by 1980; but I think it took a couple more years. So, after that, I got involved in a couple of buildings in New York, one of which was an office building on Forty-Ninth Street called Tower 49, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Its principal owner was a man called Ware Travelstead, who was a dynamic young man, and a dynamic developer, who also had a great taste for modern architecture. And he wanted to do good development, but elegant buildings. Gordon Wildermuth ran that job. I was involved; and we got to know Travelstead quite well. In 1985, he had the idea of developing the abandoned dockland wharves in London, to make an office—well, it would be more than offices, but essentially, an office development to meet the expanding needs of the city. Now, there’s a little background here. The City of London is a one square mile enclave in the middle of the metropolis. It has its own government, and, at that time, had very severe restrictions on tall buildings. Not only that, all the buildings—most of them—very few people live in the city; it’s a series of banks and commercial buildings—but many of them were 19th-century, early 20th-century buildings, with very small floors, not adaptable to modern computerized working. So, the idea to move out to the docks and build where there was plenty of space, and build big floors, and big buildings, but just to build more space, because the occupants of the city were growing, and needed the space. No sooner had this plan been developed than the city agreed to have tall buildings. [laughter] However, that didn’t stop a thing. Now, the other thing that’s interesting is that—and this may show some of it—the docklands had really become abandoned.

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Here’s a picture…[showing a diagram] Here’s the City. Here’s this bend in the river, and this called the Isle of Dogs. Here’s Greenwich over here, where the hospital is. And traditionally, the cargo ships would come up the river to here, and this whole series of docks were built. Two things happened. First, it was heavily bombed in the war; and, secondly, containerization came in after the war, and this was abandoned. A container port was built further east in Felixstowe. And really, these things were empty. So, Travelstead’s plan was to develop this.

Zane: He was not English?

Radford: Travelstead was American. When I met him first, I think he was with a company called First Boston. [Looking through papers] It’s a financial company. And—wait a minute. Where am I?

Zane: Well, you were explaining that the docks, that that whole area had been very badly bombed.

Radford: And it was empty, when we went there. So, he hired the Chicago office to do this. And Gordon [Wildermuth] then moved to Chicago, and he was in charge of it administratively; Bruce Graham was the design partner. I.M. Pei was brought in as a consultant; essentially, he was represented by Harry [Henry] Cobb.

Zane: Why was he brought in as a consultant?

Radford: I can’t answer that, because it was before my involvement. When I got there, Harry was there. And a landscape architect called Laurie Olin. And so, in the early stages of the discussion, there would be our office and Harry, and Laurie Olin. Now, this work involved enormous negotiations with the British authorities: the local authorities, the county, the central government. In fact, there had to be an Act of Parliament in the end. But, in the end, it

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was approved. And we began doing more finite work. Now, our initial responsibility was to develop what I would call a platform. [looking through plan] Where are we? That’s not…

Zane: So you said when this happened, Gordon basically went out to Chicago, and I guess he went…

Radford: No, he’d been there for other reasons. He’d moved before, for other reasons.

Zane: And you? So you traveled a lot? Or did you go out there…?

Radford: No, no. I haven’t got there yet. [laughter]

Zane: Okay, sorry.

Radford: That’s all right. The idea was to make this wharf a piece of land again, with underneath it, all the services, the parking, the roads, and so forth. And these pink things—these buildings—were not necessarily part of our initial commission. Our commission was the master plan, and, naturally, the office hoped it would get buildings. In fact, Pei did this building [pointing]; our office did some of these buildings. That comes later. That comes later. Now, as the thing was being developed, Wildermuth asked me if I would like to get involved. And I spent a year in Chicago, traveling back and forth. I lived in the Hancock Building for a time. And then, after that year, Jennifer [Radford] and I went to London for three years, to work on this. The first involvement was really quite exciting. We developed this huge platform, completely embracing the old wharf. There was an amusing facet there: The old wharf had been built with a series of concrete walls, which were shaped like this, and were called banana walls, because they looked like a banana. And these walls had been deemed by the antiquarian authorities to be historical monuments, and we weren’t allowed to touch them. So we had to straddle these things with our structure over the top, which was quite an

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engineering feat. Anyway, we were getting along like a house on fire when Travelstead sold the project to Olympia & York—the Reichmanns. And Olympia & York really had no choice but to keep us involved, after maybe two years by now of negotiations, the Act of Parliament, all the work that had been done. But, they never really liked us.

Zane: Do you know why he sold? Why he bailed out?

Radford: I think he just sold to make profit. [laughter]

Zane: You mean he had made what he wanted?

Radford: Wildermuth knew him better. I was rather disappointed at the time, you know, because I liked Travelstead. And the Olympia & York team were not Travelstead’s. You know, that wonderful remark, “You are no Jack Kennedy!”? [laughter] And the whole rapport… In fact, a whole slew of people was moved in from Toronto.

Zane: Like architects and engineers?

Radford: Yes. On their payroll. You know, they brought this whole team of people. And you know, one had to work with these people, and it wasn’t the same thing. And I remember grumbling to Wildermuth. I said, “Why did Travelstead do this?” And he said, “Well,” he said, “that’s his business. He’s a developer.” [The whole project] wouldn’t have happened without his drive. So, that’s the similarity in a way for both these projects. I was really involved—more so in Jeddah—as I was involved in the design of both the Haj and the air force base—but a lot of my work was in this coordination of the underground engineering for these two huge projects. And in a way, that’s what I was good at, you know.

Zane: You were there for three years…

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Radford: I was there for three years.

Zane: How much of it was finished? Was it?

Radford: There was an elaborate system of roundabouts. You know, this is England; we have roundabouts everywhere. The access from the north came here, and there was a big roundabout, and that roundabout was in two levels. You went up a ramp, and you came down a ramp, and then between the up ramps was a ramp going underneath, which went round here, and gave access to the underground. When I left, the access to all this was finished, and a great deal of work was done underground. I left because the design philosophy of the Chicago office had changed. And they were doing—and some of the work round this roundabout here was being done then, by them—what I would regard it as second-rate Post Modern. But it wasn’t the type of building that I was used to doing. And I became uncomfortable with this ambience. It didn’t actually affect my direct work, but I didn’t particularly want to go on doing this. So, I decided—which may have been wrong—but I decided to take early retirement, and I came home. And we came back here. We had rented this house; we took it back again. And here we are. And that was eighteen years ago, 1990. And whether I did the right thing—I certainly did emotionally—whether I did the right thing financially, or anything else—but Jennifer and I have been very happy here. So, you know, you take the rough with the smooth. But, in a way, it was not the happiest of separations from the firm, although there were many people whom I’m still friendly with. In fact, Wildermuth calls me all the time, because he’s also giving his oral history, and he keeps talking about how he’s doing, and how I’m doing, and so forth. There was a man in the Chicago office, [Thomas] Eyerman, who was an architect, but he was the business partner of the firm some years ago. He once said, in some general discussion in the partnership meeting, he said, “No one has ever left the firm happy.” Which is an interesting [comment]. It’s a very big firm. And the

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conflicts—well, there are friendships, and there are those plusses, but, also, in the magnitude of a corporation of that size, [the potential conflicts involved with]: Who becomes a partner? Who makes the decisions? Whose views are overwhelmed? Whose views are pushed forth? You know, there’s room for conflict.

Zane: I think I read someplace that SOM was the first firm to get big, and have a corporate face, which is [maybe] what you’re alluding to…

Radford: Well, it does indeed.

Zane: Did that mean that the public face had to be the same?

Radford: No. No, it didn’t. In fact, in the three, and sometimes four, offices—until one was closed—the results—the work was different. Although, in my opinion, up until the—I would say the 1980s, I think all the work would have been respected by all the people. I mean the work that Chuck Bassett was doing in San Francisco, or in Hawaii—in fact, he did the Weyerhaeuser building in Tacoma. They were modern buildings, different from the type of designs from the buildings we might have made in New York, but they were fine buildings. And the same was true of the office in Portland. And the same was true in Chicago, when they were doing Hancock and Sears. But then something changed. And, of course, in New York, Bunshaft had retired; a young partner called Raul de Armas was also a modern architect, and he did two or three very good buildings, some of which I was involved in. And then, I’m never quite clear what happened. [David] Childs came in—Childs had been in Washington, and he came to New York, and his presence changed the design philosophy. Now, how that got to Chicago, I don’t know. Because when I arrived in Chicago to work on Canary Wharf, I was amazed by the designs—they were assigned two buildings—and I was amazed by the design of those buildings.

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Zane: Meaning?

Radford: Well, I call it Post Modernism. And there had been a building built in Boston called Rose Wharf, which actually, in its way, is quite a striking building, but it’s less of a Modern building than a Post Modern building. And that was done by a partner called Adrian Smith, in Chicago. Adrian Smith’s early work, as a young man, he did in Latin America. It was, you know, wonderful sort of Corbusier stuff. But then, these things change.

Zane: So, in a way, what you’re saying is that towards the end of your time there, they were like, in a way, sort of separate firms. That whatever went on in Chicago was different from what was going on in New York. Or did that then extend to the specific office itself?

Radford: That’s an interesting question. Because the fact that we both collaborated on these two enormous projects, we weren’t separate firms from that point of view. But I suppose the dominance that Bunshaft exerted in New York, for the time he was there, meant that really all the buildings of any—there were buildings which weren’t any good, and things like that—but all the buildings of any consequence had his stamp. In Chicago, there were two partners, [Bruce] Graham, who was a good designer, and Walter Netsch, who was a very innovative designer, very innovative. And the two of them were dynamos. And then, on the West Coast, there was Chuck Bassett, who was also a very good architect. Now, these buildings that I didn’t like in Canary Wharf I think were designed by Bruce Graham. I did know Bruce Graham-I knew him very well—but I didn’t know him well enough to debate this issue. One of your questions leads to this: When Kevin Roche had to give a eulogy of Gordon at the memorial service, and he began by saying, “The great thing about Bunshaft is that he practiced good architecture in the context of a very large firm.” And you see, you get a man like [Frank] Gehry, who really is an independent—he has an office, but—or Kevin, himself, for that matter, and many of these architects…

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Zane: Or [Jim] Polshek.

Radford: Polshek. Polshek, yes.

Zane: So, what you’re saying is that, for them, their firm is—well, if it’s named for them, you know, maybe it started out largely as their design stamp…

Radford: Well, that’s true.

Zane: But that the people who come to work in those offices—is this what you’re saying?—sort of follow then whatever that philosophy, and that basic style?

Radford: Yes. Yes. But, of course, as everyone gets older, things branch out, you know, and younger people come along and do things. It’s interesting that none of these people ever took credit in their own name. I mean Skidmore, Owings & Merrill remains. And Skidmore and Owings started the firm. They were related by marriage. And then they brought in Merrill, who was an engineer. And they were still active, as long as they were alive. They became consulting partners. Merrill left quite early; he wanted to retire. But Skid was active to the end. And Owings was a very active person, went rushing round the world. So.

Zane: Could you just back up one minute? And you probably have spoken about this before, but let me just get it again to be sure. You said the New York office had Gordon’s stamp. Could you be more specific, in terms of what, to you, that was?

Radford: Well, the most significant buildings he was responsible for, seventeen or eighteen buildings. Now, one of the things that’s interesting is that the designs that he did, they’re not all the same building. If you think of Lever House, American Can, the Hirshhorn Museum, which I was not involved in,

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the Johnson Library in Texas, the Haj, a big office building in Jeddah, these are very different buildings. But they all have the same rigorous discipline. That’s what I think. And of course, no historical reference in detail; they have historical reference maybe in modern building, but not in detail.

Zane: And they were all produced in this shop that, as you described it in our previous sessions, was one of collaboration, where everybody knew and did everything.

Radford: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Zane: Which was not the case elsewhere.

Radford: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was in Chicago. There was another aspect. There was a discipline in the New York office. The client came to us and gave us his requirements. Those requirements were analyzed, and a design was developed, and the client either approved or disapproved, and ultimately approved this. And then that design was put into working drawings. And the designer was responsible for ensuring that those working drawings did, in fact, represent the design. Then, the next phase, the building was bid for construction, and there were shop drawings, which are the final documents. Those also have to be approved by the designer. Now, this requires a certain—there’s a thread of discipline running all the way through. And I remember once having a discussion with John Dinkeloo, who was Kevin Roche’s partner, when they inherited the firm from Eero Saarinen, and he described, without my prompting, the same discipline in their firm. Now, in this year that I spent in Chicago, in 1985— 1986, a new system had been developed, which they called the studio system. And the studio system was essentially groups of young designers, and the same people were supposed to continue to make the working drawings. Now, of course, their skill was different. I’ve never made working drawings. My wife used to make working drawings. And I wouldn’t have

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presumed to make them. I knew what the working drawing had to do, and I made sure that the building would be built the way it ought to be, following those drawings. But the skills of these people were quite different. So I thought the studio system was sort of nuts, but there it was. And added to which what they were so proud, and still are so proud, to call a full-service office, where they do everything. They do site engineering, design, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, interiors, landscape—the whole thing. And that becomes—what’s the word in business? There’s a sort of corporate engulfment of things.

Zane: It’s interesting. Of course, you know, you get all this perspective as you’ve spent your life… But I wonder have you ever thought about what might have been different for you had you not gone to a large corporate firm?

Radford: Oh yes. [laughter] Well, yes.

Zane: It obviously has its advantages.

Radford: Yes, but I’ve often thought that I didn’t have the entrepreneurial character at a certain point to have broken away. You know, many people did. Many people came to the firm… In fact, Richard Meier worked in our firm for a time. And at a certain point, he left, and seems to have done great things ever since. Those are terrific buildings. They’re in the spirit of what he might have done had he stayed in the firm. Well, when I came to this country, I had a fabulous education; I was trained; I had this wonderful opportunity to go to Harvard. But, I had no money. [laughter]

Zane: Not a small problem.

Radford: So I got this job, and the job grew, and the emoluments grew with it, after a certain point. And we were able to send our children to good schools, and good universities. And whether we would have done better… But I really

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don’t think I had the guts to get out. Funnily enough, Jennifer and I used to talk of it from time to time. And, you know, there were ups and downs. Sometimes we had big triumphs; sometimes we had disappointments. And when we had disappointments, we would say, Now what are we going to do? But we never really found anything—or I never felt that I could do it. Maybe I’m wrong. I think the next generation works quite differently.

Zane: In what way?

Radford: The commitment to one firm, à la Japanese, is…

Zane: Right. Is gone.

Radford: Is gone. Yes. In fact, my older son, who is an astronomer, moves around. He’s always doing the same sort of professional work. In fact, his professional skill in one environment is transferred, and that’s why he’s moved, because they want him to do that. My other son is an architect with a single partner, so the two of them, they’re running their own firm. They made that break.

Zane: Well, I mean it’s a very good point, that there was, in general, a different mindset.

Radford: That’s absolutely right. And so many of the people of my particular generation stayed with the firm almost to the end.

Zane: That is how things were done. I was going to ask you—I wanted to talk a little bit about your own philosophy. I know that I have this paper—your notes for an interview; and then also, here are some of your reflections, which might give us a little bit of a plan. You call yourself an unreconstructed modern architect.

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Radford: Right.

Zane: So maybe that would be a good jumping off place. And then I have some other questions. I think you did express pretty well what you saw, and the kind of architecture that you really cleaved to when you were young; but, you know, maybe talk about how things might have changed, or didn’t change, as you worked over the years?

Radford: Well, I don’t think my philosophy changed that much. But one thing that’s quite interesting: My first experience of architecture was with Gothic buildings—cathedrals, which are essentially structural masterpieces. And then, when the Gothic era came to an end, the Renaissance came in, which in a way, was less original. There were absolutely marvelous buildings, and many of the buildings, as buildings, had very little to do with Greece and Rome. The requirements of these buildings were totally different. But the superficial design was related to the Classical order. And towards the end of that period, there was a fellow called [Sir John] Soane, who did some very stripped-down, elegant buildings, where the basic form is what comes through. That was followed by the Victorian era—I’m really talking of England, at the moment, and I’ll come to America in a moment—and the Victorian period, where there was what was called “the battle of the styles,” where people did Gothic buildings, and Classical buildings… However, in this country, two forces came forward. One was [Louis] Sullivan, in Chicago, and his pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, who really were pursuing a philosophy which is much more akin to Modern architecture than what went before, although Sullivan laced his buildings with the most fabulous ornament.

Zane: Right. So what was it about them that they were Modern?

Radford: The shapes of the buildings, the magnitude of some of them. Now, there was another force on the east coast, [Henry Hobson] Richardson, and what

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they called the shingle buildings. But Richardson’s buildings are magnificent sort of Romanesque stone buildings. And then, in this country, came [Walter] Gropius, and Mies [van der Rohe], who went straight to Chicago from Germany. Gropius came through England, and came to Harvard. And the Bauhaus had developed this stripped-down approach, where the functional requirements of the building, and the functional expression of the elements of the structure-of the lighting, of the elevators, of anything—there’s no reference to other people’s designs. They grow out of themselves.

Zane: So that’s the “form follows function”…

Radford: “Form follows function.” And that was the philosophy that I was attracted to as a very young boy. To digress a bit: It was funny going back to England. When I was young, there was a firm in England called Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall, and they were pioneers of Modern building in England, just before the war, and after the war. When we went back to do Canary Wharf, they were the associated architects with our firm. And I remember talking to one of the partners, who became a good friend, and he said-we were talking about his old firm; he and I were of similar age—and he only knew it by reputation—and he said, “You know, there are people in our firm who have no idea who they were.” [YR&M] [laughter] Which is probably true in SOM. [laughter] Well, I don’t know if that answers the question. To me, it’s silly to say it was a religion, but it was a firmly-held philosophy. And it’s difficult to express. But there are buildings now, which I respond to, because I believe they follow the same fundamental philosophy. And there are other buildings that I am repelled by.

Zane: Well, could you give some examples of each?

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Radford: Well, most of the work that’s done by [Renzo] Piano I think is marvelous. [Santiago] Calatrava. I’m not too keen on Mr. [Frank] Gehry, who I think is a sculptor. And they’re very exciting things. One was fine, but… [laughter]

Zane: I can see why you would not be so fond of them, because, in fact, the form is not following the function.

Radford: No. Not at all. It’s a sculpture. And, of course, it’s become a sort of fashionable thing for cities to try and have such a building. And universities, particularly. [laughter]

Zane: Have you seen the new New York Times building? Have you seen pictures of it?

Radford: I’ve seen pictures, yes. And I’m trying to remember what they were.

Zane: Well, you can see through the windows, you know, you see the stairs. It’s quite…

Radford: Where is it?

Zane: It’s right across the street from the Port Authority. It’s on Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. On Eighth Avenue, between Forty-First and Fortieth.

Radford: I know the site, yes.

Zane: Well, Piano did that.

Radford: I didn’t realize that. Shows my ignorance. [Sir Norman] Foster did a building, I think that’s also on Eighth Avenue…

Zane: Yeah, that’s at Fifty-Seventh Street.

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Radford: …for…

Zane: Hearst.

Radford: Hearst, yes. Where he kept the old building, and built this tower over the top. It looks like…

Zane: I see it out of my window, actually. I have to look at it all the time.

Radford: [laughter] It’s actually a crazy insistence. Well, and this may not be an insistence by antiquarians; this may be insistence by cost-conscious owners, not wanting to tear down a perfectly sound building. But it’s very difficult to adapt a new building to an old one, with those restrictions. And Washington’s a joke, all these façades with huge buildings behind them. Very unpleasant.

Zane: Well, if form follows function, then I guess what you’re saying is, the artistry is applied afterwards, if it is [at all].

Radford: Well, when I first was here, I had to write a report on what I’d been doing for a couple of years. And I had been out to see Philip Johnson’s house.

Zane: The Glass House.

Radford: The Glass House [in New Canaan, Connecticut] where the structure and the materials are the decoration. I remember saying to myself, Well, we’ve gotten this far. Now we do need a little enrichment. If you make an analogy of what Sullivan did, his enrichment was phenomenal. Or to go back to something like the Mosque in Cordoba [Spain], with these fabulous enriched panels on the outside. But enrichment is a different thing from modifying the basic structure. In fact, I think the basic tool of a modern building is its

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structure. And if the structure is amorphous—which it may have to be, for certain purposes—it doesn’t become a very good building.

Zane: What would be an example of a building like that?

Radford: You mean a building that doesn’t work, or a building that does work?

Zane: One that has to be amorphous, just even that, so I could understand what that means?

Radford: Well, that’s a very good question. Well, I’m not sure that I can come up with… I guess, in a way, I’m just saying that because it’s so important that a structure does dominate the design… Well, of course, there are a lot of buildings that are just built; they have no design.

Zane: Yes. Well, we see those every day.

Radford: I think there are a lot of hospital buildings where the dominance is not the structure, but it’s the very complicated requirements of the hospital; the adjacencies are important. You have little rooms, and big rooms; you have labs, a whole mixture of things. If you think of Bellevue, which is a fine building, in a way, you don’t immediately think of its structure. You think of its white brick, and its shapes. There are other buildings. For example, the New York zoning has required buildings to produce this setback ziggurats, which started immediately after the war; but, even now, the zoning is such that buildings have to get smaller as they get higher, essentially. Now, that is not necessarily a good element of design; it’s something that’s imposed. And it’s possible that the so-called Freedom Tower will get away with it, because it’s got this very ingenious twist on top of a heavy base. It may be a very interesting building.

Zane: What was the most interesting part of the process to you, intellectually?

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Radford: I suppose solving the planning. These complicated buildings with different requirements, sometimes housing as many as three or four thousand people, different functions, and the planning was a puzzle. It was an enjoyable puzzle to solve. And then, this whole business of the coordination, which essentially meant: What you see is what’s in the ceiling—lights, ducts, sprinklers—all these things. And they can make the room chaos, or they can make it exciting. I think it’s very difficult to describe one’s philosophy in these things.

Zane: Well, we do get at it, you know, just by discussing the particulars. I wonder what the next big jump will be. We’re out of Post Modernism now.

Radford: Oh yes, that’s gone. That’s gone. Well, I think there are really two avenues, avenues which are more conservative and classical-and you might say [Richard] Meier, and people like that, are in that category-and then there are more dramatic and fanciful buildings, and [Frank] Gehry is an obvious one, and this fellow [Steven] Holl, and the building he’s done at MIT. And there is also this remarkable firm from Switzerland, [Herzog & de Meuron]. The first building I was aware of was they modified a huge power station in London into the Tate Modern Museum, which was an immense building. And apparently—I’ve never seen it—on the outside, it’s exactly the same as it was before. Apparently, they did a wonderful job. And they are now several things here. Foster does a lot of interesting work, although he does so much stuff that he has a very varied solution to problems. He, of course, would say that every problem is different, so the design reflects what the problem is. And I think he’s right. I think he’s right. One problem with office buildings is they do tend to be very similar.

Zane: Yes, because the same thing happens in them. That’s right.

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Radford: Because they’re the same thing. They’re the same thing. An apartment building’s even worse. [laughter]

Zane: Well, but on the other hand, what you’re saying, obviously, is if you’re given the responsibility of rebuilding the Reichstag in Berlin, it’s a whole different thing.

Radford: Yes.

Zane: What do you do about that dome?

Radford: Which is said to be wonderful. Have you seen it?

Zane: I did. Last year.

Radford: And he’s also put a dome in the middle of the British Museum, where there was a courtyard. So, it’s an interesting…

Zane: Maybe back for just a minute to SOM, and what is being produced now. Do you follow that at all?

Radford: I really don’t know anymore. I very rarely talk to people there. When I left, I got the sense that my views were not particularly sought after. So, the hell with it. Let them do what they want to do. And I’m sure they’re doing fine. I’m sure commercially, it’s a great success. I don’t know that, but I think it is.

Zane: But it’s still one of the largest…

Radford: Largeness is not the issue.

Zane: Well, except that in a way it is.

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Radford: Well, magnitude doesn’t produce quality. Now, I’m not saying they’re producing buildings of no quality, but the quality doesn’t come because it’s big. And, because of the way the world is working, they’re doing many, many more buildings abroad. During the period I was there, we used to do buildings abroad… When I first went to the office, we were building the Istanbul Hilton. And of course, we were doing these huge air bases in Morocco and Okinawa. Then we did a building in Brussels; we built a building in Tunis. We did a building in Paris. But they were rare. The big practice was in this country. Now, my sense is, the big practice is abroad. Our office is doing lots of work in China. They’re doing work all over the place.

Zane: Which requires some either different, or additional, kinds of preparations?

Radford: I’ve never done that, so I don’t know. Yes, I’m sure it does. I’m sure it does. Well, Jeddah required… Obviously, working in a foreign country, things are different. Yes.

Zane: You need to understand the historical references, and…

Radford: Yes.

Zane: It is interesting how it’s all changed. So Roger, maybe what I’ll do is put these [papers, notes for an interview, and previously written reflections] in front of you. See if anything beckons that you might want to comment on. I mean, as I look it, I think we’ve done a lot.

Radford: I’m so very repetitive. I’ve said all this. [laughter]

Zane: That’s good! That’s how we can be sure we’ve gotten what we want. Oh, I see one thing here.

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Radford: This is discussion of Gordon, isn’t it? For Vanity Fair? They didn’t do a too—I saw the resulting article.

Zane: They didn’t do a very good job?

Radford: Well, it was so short. And, as I suppose was inevitable, it took some personal references to Gordon which really were not the essence of the man. I’ve forgotten what they were now. But I remember, at the time, I had to go to New York, because I had to give a deposition in some case involving a rather tragic accident, where our firm had actually been the architect for the building. And one of the lawyers I was working with—this magazine came out-she came to me the next morning, and said, “I opened this magazine, and here you are talking about this.” And she showed it to me. And I looked rather sour. And she said, “It’s not very fair, is it?” [laughter]

Zane: There’s one comment, in particular, that I’m interested in following up on, where you say “there was a moral and political component in the modern movement.”

Radford: Oh, yes.

Zane: Which is something we have not talked about.

Radford: Well, in England and in Germany, I think this grew out of a sort of left-wing, without using that in a pejorative sense, desire to make life better for the working people, for the masses of the people. It’s what Mr. [John] Edwards is talking about now. And whether moral is the right word… In England, of course, we had to build about four million houses, which had been destroyed. We had to provide schools. And there was the sense that these should be efficient and comfortable, and all the characteristics, which in a way meshed with the philosophy of modern architecture. And Gropius

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brought that philosophy here, to Harvard. He always was talking about that. He used to attack what he called the “coca-colonial” design.

Zane: Coca-colonial?

Radford: Coca-colonial. [laughter] A combination of Coca-Cola and colonial architecture. [laughter]

Zane: Looking back, would you say that you enjoyed the career choice you made?

Radford: Oh yes. Yes. As I told you, when I left the army, I wasn’t quite sure I was going to continue it. But I did. And I’m glad I did. Oh yes. But as I said, you know, there are ups and downs in all of life, and in every job. In a way, I wish I could have been more enthusiastic about the last few jobs, but I’m not, so.

Zane: You were not.

Radford: I’m not. No. Canary Wharf was a fascinating intellectual exercise, to solve the problems, to make sure they worked, and to get people to agree to them, and to work for the people who had to make all the elements go together. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. But it wasn’t particularly enjoyable. And part of that was that—and I don’t want to keep emphasizing this-the Olympia & York people were really not simpatico. They wanted to do it themselves, in fact. I remember one of these fellows, who came from Toronto, who was an architect, had decided he would become registered as an architect in England. And eventually, he did. And I remember talking to him—he’d talked to me; he said, “You know, I’ve just become registered as an architect in England.” And I said, “But my God, you’re the owner. You don’t need to be an architect.” [laughter] And it wasn’t only Olympia & York. This is a problem that these large corporate organizations—particularly if they’re real-estate or developing firms—they have their own in-house people, and I

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suppose they need them—they have their in-house advisors. And there may be conflict, or there may a rapport. One tries to make a rapport. Some of these people were fine.

Zane: It also can be a cost-saving issue for them. I mean if you have… You know, you’ve got your architects on staff, who may not be particularly ept.

Radford: It may have cost them more! [laughter] I remember when we were doing Lincoln Center, it was an amalgamation with Eero. I’ve forgotten how the fees were structured, but at some point, Eero said to Gordon, “You know, we ought to get double fees, because of all this argument that we go through.” [laughter]

Zane: Just to ask you, since we’re sitting here—what about Philip Johnson’s work?

Radford: Well, he began, of course, quite remarkably. He was a very interesting man. At the age of forty, he went back to Harvard to become an architect, and he built a little house in Cambridge.

Zane: That was his project.

Radford: Yes. You’ve seen it?

Zane: No. I have never seen it, actually.

Radford: It’s a building with two rooms, and then a fence all the way around. So, there’s a garden and a fence; and you walk down the street, it’s still there— very elegant. Then he built this house in New Canaan. Then he built several other houses in that area. Then, suddenly, he had some sort of revelation, and decided to build the building for AT&T with the Chippendale roof. And then, in my opinion, he got worse and worse and worse. And the Lipstick Building in Third Avenue is awful.

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Zane: Have you ever been inside it?

Radford: No.

Zane: He had his offices in there for a while.

Radford: Oh, really? I see. Of course, he was heavily involved with Mies in the Seagram [building]. But Seagram is really Mies’ building. Philip was the— I’m not belittling what he did, but he was the required New York architect. He never stopped being a proponent of good design, a proponent of the necessity of having architects. I don’t think he ever wrote a full-scale book. He should have done it, because he spoke very well.

Zane: Well, there was that little International Style book that he worked on.

Radford: Oh, that was really part of the exhibition, wasn’t it? It was the exhibition catalogue, really. Maybe it was more than that. Oh, he did it with Henry Russell Hitchcock. I remember a friend of mine in England once asked me if I thought that [Nathaniel] Owings would be a good person to write the history of Modern architecture. And I knew Owings quite well, and I said, “No, I don’t think he would be. But I think Philip Johnson would be.” This was maybe thirty years ago. I said, “I think Philip Johnson would be excellent.” And I think he would have been. Nothing came of it. He did some perfectly awful buildings in Boston. Now, he must have done smaller buildings for universities and [other] things, which I haven’t been aware of.

Zane: And he did that Crystal Cathedral, out in California.

Radford: Oh yes. Well, I think that’s probably quite striking. Everybody said that—I can’t remember the name of the clergyman—that he and Johnson were cut

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from the same cloth, with this tremendous enthusiasm for what they believed in.

Zane: And then he did—I went down to do some work with the Amon Carter Museum, in Texas. He designed that museum.

Radford: Oh, I didn’t realize that. Yes. That’s in Fort Worth?

Zane: Yes. Sort of similar to what he did at Lincoln Center. It was sort of the same time period. So, Roger, anything else you’d like to put on the record? Or would you like to see what you’ve got, and then decide?

Radford: Well, that might be the nicest…

Zane: You can either have me come back up, and we can do it, or you can just write it, and insert it.

Radford: So I just wait until I can read it.

Zane: Yes.

Radford: Well, if that’s all right with you…

Zane: Sure. You have to wait until you can read it.

Radford: That’s true. That’s true. Well, if you think you’ve developed enough.

Zane: Well I can’t think of anything that we haven’t done. I mean if you…

Radford: No, I’m satisfied.

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Zane: And so what I think is that there are certain things that only you really know; I think that when you have it in front of you, and can really see it, you’ll know.

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Abercrombie, Stanley. “25-Year Award Goes to Lever House.” American Institute of Architects Journal 69 (March 1980): 76-79.

Adams, Nicholas. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: the experiment since 1936. Milan, Italy: Mondadori Electa, 2006.

"Bearing walls in Iowa." Architectural Forum, 118 (May 1963): [126]-130

" Blue chip banking." Interiors 144, no.4 (November 1984): 130-141.

Bush-Brown, Albert, ed. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Architecture and Urbanism 1973-1983. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983.

Crosbie, Michael J. “Evaluation: Prototype in the Suburbs.” Architecture 77 (January 1988):82-85.

Danz, Ernst. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1950-1962. Introduction by Henry Russell-Hitchcock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963.

" Designing the campus." Architectural Record 139 (May 1966): 165-188.

" Down-to-earth tower." Architectural Forum 128, n. 3 (April 1968 ): 36-[45].

" A field of tents in the sky: The structure of the Hajj Terminal, King Abdul-Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia." Architectural Record 171, no.11 (Sept.II 1983): p.84-85.

" Irving Trust Operations Center, New York, N.Y." Architectural Record .169, n.4 (March 1981 ): 124-125.

Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Architectural History Foundation, and Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988.

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" Lincoln Center, New York." Architectural Record 132 (September 1962): [133]-148, 196- 204.

Menges, Axel. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1963-1973. Introduction by Arthur Drexler. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1974.

" No corn in Iowa." Progressive Architecture 47 (February 1966): 144-151.

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"Peristylar precast structures by Skidmore Owings and Merrill." Progressive Architecture 44 (September 1963): 126-135.

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Woodward, Christopher. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

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ROGER NICHOLAS RADFORD

Born: 15 December, 1926, Nottingham, England

Education: Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Diploma in Architecture, Cambridge University, St. Johns College 1944-1949 Master of Architecture, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, 1952-53

Military Service: Royal Engineers, 1950-52

Work Experience: SOM New York, 1953 Associate, 1957 Associate Partner, 1960 SOM Chicago, 1986 SOM London, 1987-1990

Retirement: 1990

Married: Jennifer Hay, 1956

Award-Winning Project: Haj Terminal, King Abdul Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi, Arabia: American Institute of Architects Award, New York, 1982 American Institute of Architects Honor Award, 1983 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1983

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INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

American Can Company, Greenwich, Connecticut 96-103 American Republic Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa 92-96 Army Service, Royal Engineers 13-14, 23-24, 26

Banque Lambert, Brussels, Belgium 58-59 Boots Cash Chemist Building, Beeston, England 3-5, 116-117 Bunshaft, Gordon 30-31, 35-37, 38, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 75-76, 77-79, 81, 85, 113, 125-126, 130, 141-142

Calder, Alexander (Sandy) 84, 94-96 Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, London, England 127-129, 132-133, 135-139, 155 Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City, New York 46, 54-56, 85-86 Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, Bloomfield, Connecticut 34, 36, 43-48, 131-132

Dubuffet, Jean 84

Federal Aviation Agency, National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center, Atlantic City, New Jersey 106-110

Gehry, Frank O. 124 Graham, Bruce 141 Gropius, Walter 27-29 Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York City, New York 66-67

Hajj Terminal, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 60, 65, 125-126, 130, 132-135 Hancock, John, Building, Kansas City, Missouri 61-62 Hancock, John, Building, New Orleans, Louisiana 57-60 Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts 27-34 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. 110-111

Johnson, Lyndon Baines, Library, Austin, Texas 111 Johnson, Philip 149, 156-158 Joint Banking Centre, Kuwait City, Kuwait 117, 124-125

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, Airport (formerly Idlewild Airport), New York City, New York 50-53 Khan, Fazlur R. (Faz) 60, 125, 132

Lambert, Phyllis Bronfman 62-64 Lever House, New York City, New York 34 Lincoln Center, Library and Museum for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York 74-83

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Manhattan House, New York City, New York 54, 131 Marine Midland Bank Building (140 Broadway), New York City, New York 86-89, 92, 112 Meier, Richard 144 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 63 Moore, Henry 82, 84

Netsch, Walter A. 85, 86, 141 New York Stock Exchange (unbuilt), New York City, New York 114-116 919 Third Avenue Building, New York City, New York 112, 113, 117-118 Noguchi, Isamu (Samu) 45-46, 58, 84, 88 Noxell Corporation, Noxzema Warehouse, Cockeysville, Maryland 66-67, 103-105

Pei, Ieoh Ming (I. M.) 23, 34, 122, 136 Pevsner, Nicholas (Sir) 14, 27

Radford, Jennifer (wife of Roger) 64-65 Radford, Oliver (son of Roger) 65 Radford, Simon (son of Roger) 65 Reynolds Metals Company Office Building, Richmond, Virginia 149-150

Saarinen, Eero (son of Eliel) 75-78, 80-81 Skidmore Owings & Merrill, New York City, New York 37-43, 68, 132, 140-144, 152-153 Smith, Adrian 141

Tower 49, New York City, New York 135

United States Steel Building (One Liberty Plaza), New York City, New York 89-91 University of Massachusetts, Warren McGuirk Alumni Stadium, Amherst, Massachusetts 70-72

Weidlinger, Paul 97 Williams, E. Owen 3 Wright, Frank Lloyd 6

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03/27/2009 Projects with SOM

As Junior Designer Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. 1953-1954: preliminary design Bloomfield, CT

As Senior Designer Reynolds Metals Company completed 1958 Richmond, VA United Airlines Terminal completed 1959 JFK International Airport, NY Chase Manhattan Bank completed 1959 410 Park Avenue branch, New York City John Hancock Building completed 1961 New Orleans, LA Union Carbide Research Center completed 1961 Eastview, NY Noxzema Chemical Company warehouse completed 1961 Cockeysville, MD office building completed 1967 As Principal Designer Guardian Life Insurance Company completed 1962 New York, NY As Senior Designer John Hancock Building completed 1962 Kansas City, MO United Carbon Company completed 1962 Houston, TX Library for the Performing Arts completed 1965 Lincoln Center, New York City American Republic Building completed 1965 Des Moines, IA University of Massachusetts Football Stadium completed 1965 Amherst, MA Federal Aviation Agency partially completed 1965

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National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center Atlantic City, NJ Marine Midland Building completed 1967 140 Broadway, New York City Reynolds Metals Company Administration Building completed 1968 Richmond, VA New York Stock Exchange - Blue Room completed 1969 New York City 919 Third Avenue completed 1970 New York City American Can Building completed 1970 Greenwich, CT Connecticut General addition and garage completed 1972 Bloomfield, CT 1166 Avenue of the Americas completed 1973 New York City

As Principal Designer Successful competition entry Joint Banking Center 1976 Kuwait City completed by others

As Senior Designer Haj Terminal, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia completed 1980 Master plan, Haj Terminal, RSAF base Irving Trust Company completed 1983 New York City Tower 49 completed 1984 East 49th Street, New York City Shearson Lehman American Express completed 1986 New York City Canary Wharf Financial Center ongoing at retirement 1990 London, England

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