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| Beyond the Harvard Box | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
October 5 - November 15, 2006
In the summer of 2006, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Michael Meredith,
conducted interviews with architects Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen, Victor Lundy, and I.M. Pei, as
part of the GSD exhibition, Beyond the Harvard Box. Click on a name to view the full interview with each architect.
Click here to view a trailer of the interviews.
Beyond the Harvard Box focuses on the work of six architects who graduated from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design architecture program during the 1940s. Their generation of students studied under Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and other significant mainstays of early modernism in the United States. These six architects—Edward L. Barnes, John Johansen, I.M. Pei, Ulrich Franzen, Paul Rudolph and Victor Lundy—had successful and influential careers, forming varied architectural trajectories in the postwar period. All of the work shown in this exhibition was completed during the 1950s and 1960s, a majority of the work shown are houses and were done during a time when they were establishing their practices, before they were lumped together as “late modernists,” before the Vietnam War escalated, before Robert Venturi happened (Complexity and Contradiction, 1966), and before the simultaneously liberating and oppressive confusion of “postmodernism.”
This work is presented, alongside material describing the pedagogy at the GSD during the 1940s. Although we are somewhat aware of these antecedents at the GSD, our relationship with this institutional past remains largely under the surface this exhibition confronts us with fundamental questions concerning the relationship between individual and institution, and between education and practice, leaving us to ponder how so many successful, well-respected, and creatively distinct architects graduated from the same institution in the same era. Examining the student roster, it seems that there has never been a more fertile moment at any architecture school before or since.
Within architectural discourse, the 1940s at the GSD are seen as either infamous or momentous. The exhibition title refers specifically to the pejorative term, “Harvard Box,” which architect Klaus Herdeg coined to describe the Gropius-inspired, stripped-down functionalist aesthetic of these architects. In grouping them together in his influential 1983 book, The Decorated Diagram, Herdeg argued that many of the projects displayed here evince the failure of modernism and Bauhaus-influenced teaching. Eventually, these projects were displaced outside of academic discourse (including the education of recent and current GSD students), elided by simple narratives of rational modernist progression and the paradigms of historical postmodernism.
This exhibition challenges the fundamental conception of these men as so-called Harvard Box architects. Through simply observing their work, it is obvious that this collective body of architecture is not coherent enough to be grouped under any one model. If these architects have anything in common, it is that all were known for their distinctive formal inventions, their skillful combinations of pragmatism and experimentation with figurative geometric shapes, their innovative structures, and a deep interest in materials and surfaces, in other words, their willingness to escape the “box.”
As the discipline has moved beyond a self-consciously defined architectural moment, in which confusion and anxiety has become academic, students and architects can see the design mandate of this work as instructive and the projects as remarkably prescient. Of course we no longer talk about “spirit,” instead we speak of “appropriateness,” “performance,” “intent,” or “desire.” If the modernist social directive of pragmatic functionalism—that seductively reductive endgame of architecture—gave way for these six to artistry, figuration, signification, and expression, the problem for us is the same as it was then: how to use the architectural problems of function, context, typology, and history, and how to mine pragmatic technique, to solve concrete problems and produce progressive and responsible buildings.
These projects by our architectural predecessors occupy an important and complex moment in our history. This exhibition, with its emphasis on pedagogy as it was once presented at the Graduate School of Design, is highly self-conscious, questioning the enduring stereotype of the GSD as a homogenously corporate and modern design school. It is presented with the hope that it will also be instructive, representing a diverse body of design research and innovation that is useful to reexamine as practicing architects and students dealing with similarly complicated questions in our own undefined moment. Today, this work appears new again.
Michael Meredith, Assistant Professor of Architecture