For a small city, St. Louis has an extraordinarily rich history of modernist architecture. Isadore Shank, William Adair Bernoudy, Harris Armstrong, Frederick Dunn, Charles Nagel, Ralph Cole Hall, Edouard Mutrux, Hank Bauer, and Eugene Mackey were all based here at one time or other. Most of their designs -- located in the wealthier, green and leafy suburbs west of the city -- were built during the golden age of St. Louis Modernism roughly between 1930 and 1970 when status was not to be distinguished solely on the square footage of a home.

Modernism, however, got a bad name due to its association with the soulless Internationalist Style of Ludwig "Less is More" Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and their ubiquitous glass boxes designed for an urban population of automobiles and automatons rather than residents, tourists and shoppers. Being socialists first and architects second, Johnson and Mies were concerned mainly with political and social questions -- and thus built structures that reflected their vision of a workers' paradise -- as well as academic questions such as how to express the structure of a building externally. In the process, they forgot about the poor fish who would live and work among these sterile monstrosities.

Sadly they brought the same aesthetic to their domestic buildings, and nowhere was this more evident than in Johnson's Glass House and Mies' Farnsworth House. Historian Franz Schulze noted that the latter is "more nearly temple than dwelling, and it rewards aesthetic contemplation before it fulfills domestic necessity.�

However these domestic "temples" were the exception, not the rule. Unlike Mies's skyboxes, the bulk of modernist residential architecture was warm, open and organic, commingling brick, wood, stone and glass to create a sense of serenity which blurred the distinction between "inside" and "outside." Most important, they took into account the people who would live there. And unlike today's cookie cutter mansions, they were elegant and original. Was there ever a more breathtakingly beautiful home than Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a home built not overlooking a waterfall, but over a waterfall.

Sounds like he swallowed Tom Wolfe whole.
- tom moody 5-25-2007 7:14 pm [add a comment]

i mean cummon, how are you supposed to raise a family in the farnsworth house? razzzzzz!
- bill 5-25-2007 7:19 pm [add a comment]

I don't understand your reaction to this piece. Maybe I'm reading it wrong.
- Justin (guest) 5-25-2007 10:15 pm [add a comment]

the farnsworth comment was sarcasm justin. this guy has it wrong on so many glib (supposedly populist) levels. pj and mies wrote the book. they dont need to be demonized because he likes their students work better. this is a very provincial perspective. dude back east we dont find the need to bash prairie style or desert modernism because it doesnt suit our immediate surroundings. there are two swell meis towers (skyboxes!!!) in newark that are well sought after yet still affordable. as tom points out, the author swallowed whole wolfs >bauhaus = bad< baloney. either hes showing off his ignorance or thinks thats what his readers want to hear. either way, what a dick.


- bill 5-26-2007 12:26 am [add a comment]

• Okay, I'm hearing you. I shoulda had a cuppa before reading that this morning.....
  - anonymous (guest) 5-26-2007 5:44 am [add a comment] [edit]

My mom had a studio apartment in a Meis tower that was part of a project with a park and townhouses near downtown Detroit in the late 70s-early 80s. I spent a fair amount of time there and it was great. Just a little white cube with one wall of windows, it had a pacific feel and functioned exactly the way it was meant to. Any style can be abused and misused, but the International Style suffered more from its own success in the hands of capitalists and bureaucrats than from conceptual shortcomings.
- alex 5-26-2007 3:30 am [add a comment]

got any pictures?
- bill 5-26-2007 4:53 am [add a comment]

dont forget to keep reading justins materials blog. today, plywood.
- bill 5-27-2007 10:32 pm [add a comment]

I do read it regularly now. I look at all the amazing materials and think I should use that cool shit! (but then I just end up using durabond).
- L.M. 5-27-2007 10:45 pm [add a comment]