April 23, 2020 27
six-foot-wide Surrealist nocturne Le
paysage (1927), which they sold to
the National Gallery of Australia in
1977 for the then considerable sum of
$800,000.
In due course Bunshaft’s knowledge-
able integration of art with architec-
ture became a hallmark of his firm’s
professional identity. Another favorite
artistic collaborator was Isamu Nogu-
chi, the Japanese-American sculptor
who provided strong accents to several
SOM designs. These included a twenty-
eight-foot-high red metal cube thrill-
ingly perched on one corner in front
of the Minimalist black-walled 140
Broadway office tower of 1960 –1968
in New York City, as well as a sunken
Zen-style garden and fountain for the
plaza adjacent to the Chase Manhattan
Bank headquarters of 1956 –1961 fur-
ther downtown.
Chase Manhattan’s pioneering cor-
porate art collection amounted to a
veritable in-house lending museum,
and top executives got to decorate
their offices with original pieces rang-
ing from American folk art to Ab-
stract Expressionism assembled by an
acquisitions committee that included
Bunshaft. But even with the headquar-
ters’ luxurious midcentury modern fur-
nishings by the rising interior designer
Wa rd Ben nett, SOM’s routine upended
shoebox was most noteworthy for being
the first skyscraper erected in the Fi-
nancial District since the Great De-
pression. It was felt to be a harbinger
of the neighborhood’s renewal at a time
when many large companies were relo-
cating their operations to exurban cam-
puses because of lower taxation rates
and ease of commuting as middle-class
families left cities for new subdivisions
in ever-larger numbers.
SOM, never out of the game when
it came to following the money, was
responsible for several such new cor-
porate headquarters, including the
Connecticut General Insurance Com-
pany of 1953–1957 and Emhart Man-
ufacturing Company of 1960 –1962,
both in Bloomfield, Connecticut;
Reynolds Aluminum of 1955–1958
in Richmond, Virginia; IBM of 1960 –
1964 in Armonk, New York; and the
American Can Company in Green-
wich, Connecticut, of 1966–1970. All
are basically, boringly alike: sprawl-
ing rectilinear compositions two-to-
four stories high and set in splendid
isolation on bucolic sites intended
to reinforce the workplace as a self-
contained universe apart from the
larger community, a socially ques-
tionable model that Silicon Valley has
lately resurrected.
While a steady stream of depend-
ably high-quality (if repetitive) work
poured forth from SOM, Bunshaft
had the press eating out of his hand.
Bathed in the artistic aura that em-
anated from MoMA’s monographic
1950 exhibition “Recent Buildings by
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill” and the
firm’s inclusion in the museum’s 1957
group show “Buildings for Business
and Government,” Bunshaft was the
darling of several influential journals.
But when SOM moved away from its
dated- looking International Style for-
mula in favor of a bogus, genteel imita-
tion of the fashionable New Brutalism,
it stumbled badly, especially with the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden of 1966–1974 on the National
Mall in Washington, D.C.
The period’s preeminent American
architecture critic, Ada Louise Hux-
table of The New York Times, had
long been a cheerleader for Bunshaft’s
work, but her patience had begun to
run thin by the early 1970s, when she
wrote of the American Can Company
headquarters that “it must be said here
that SOM furnishings sink deeper and
deeper into a familiar, formalistic rut.”
Furthermore, she justifiably described
the travertine-encased Lyndon Baines
Johnson Presidential Library and Mu-
seum of 1969–1971 in Austin, Texas,
as “pharaonic” and like “entering an
Egyptian tomb” because of its impe-
rial monumentality and overbearing
pompousness.
Yet none of this could have readied
the irritable Bunshaft for Huxtable’s
scathing review of the Hirshhorn in- Her detailed evaluation of this
crudely realized, defensive-looking,
squat circular structure—which some
dubbed the “concrete doughnut” and
others likened to an artillery pillbox—
represented a damaging withdrawal
of establishment support. The Times
critic unleashed a barrage of invective
on Bunshaft’s most prestigious assign-
ment with a rare vehemence: she de-
nounced the Hirshhorn as nothing less
than “a male chauvinist marriage of
building and art... [a] maimed monu-
ment on a maimed Mall,” symptomatic
of SOM’s “persistent, monumental...
environmental abuse.”
Bunshaft’s final, lackluster decade
at SOM saw his critical status decline
even further because of Brutalist duds
like his last work, the National Com-
mercial Bank of 1977–1984 in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia, a twenty-seven-story
tower with a triangular ground plan
and no exterior windows. Each of
its three monolithic, travertine-clad
façades is pierced by a gigantic gaping
void, while inside lurk recessed trian-
gular atriums between seven and nine
stories high. Forget current notions of
energy conservation and sustainability.
The amount of air conditioning needed
to make this monster operable in the
Arabian climate defies imagination.
In 1988 there was widespread puz-
zlement in the design community
when Bunshaft was awarded the Pritz-
ker Prize for Architecture along with
the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer, his
somewhat older contemporary. This
surprising choice of two old-guard
modernists well past their prime was
interpreted as a rebuke to proponents
of Postmodernism, which was then at
its short-lived peak. It was also said
that the Pritzker juror who champi-
oned these past masters was Ada Lou-
ise Huxtable.
Word then circulated that Bunshaft
had nominated himself—recommen-
dations are solicited each year from
many in the profession, and no Pritz-
ker regulation prevents an architect
from advancing his or her own name.
Even though Adams does not verify
the rumor, it sounds typical of this in-
corrigible egotist. As a result, the archi-
tect could spend the last two years of
his life delusively believing that history
would number him among the foremost
master builders of his time. Yet despite
Nicholas Adams’s persuasive efforts,
it seems as though Bunshaft will con-
tinue to rank not among the greats but
merely among the goods. Q
Away from Chaos
The Middle East and the Challenge to the WestGILLES KEPEL
Translated by Henry Randolph“Gilles Kepel has long been France’s
most sophisticated scholar of radical
Islam, and Away from Chaos is his
personal and political summa—
a remarkable synthesis of decades
of passionate engagement
with the Middle East.”—The New York Times MagazineFriend
A Novel from North KoreaPAEK NAM-NYONG
Translated by Immanuel Kim“With still so little known about the
North Korean people beyond mostly
tortuous escapee narratives,
Kim enables a rare, welcome
glimpse into ‘a messy world of
human emotions and relationships
that is at once entirely alien
and eerily familiar.’”
—Booklist, Starred Review“Paek weaves themes of
greed, corruption, and self-sacrifi ce
into a subtle, restrained
narrative... A rare glimpse
into an insular world.”
—Kirkus ReviewsThe Chile Pepper
in China
A Cultural BiographyBRIAN R. DOTT“Extensive source materials in
both Chinese and English form the
bedrock for this impressive study
into how a relatively unassuming
American import so radically
changed one country’s cuisines and
traditional pharmacopoeia. The
history of the humble chile in China
is a fascinating one, especially as
viewed through Brian R. Dott’s
aff ectionate yet scholarly lens.”—Carolyn Phillips, author of
All Under Heaven: Recipes
from the 35 Cuisines of ChinaJust Like Us
The American Struggle
to Understand ForeignersTHOMAS BORSTELMANN“This is one of those books that
sticks with you. Borstelmann asks a
big question—about U.S. attitudes
toward foreigners—and has an
important argument to make.
What is more, Just Like Us sparkles
with telling details and unexpected
connections. It is, plainly put,
masterful.”—Daniel Immerwahr, author of
How to Hide an Empire: A History of
the Greater United StatesCOLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU30% OFF
W/CODE:
AAS2030% OFF
W/CODE:
AAS20ALL TITLES ARE AVAILABLE
AS EBOOKS