Philip Johnson, despite his credentials within the Modern canon (Seagram Building, Glass House, International Style exhibition at MoMA), pivoted to Postmodernism in the 1970s—proving his ability to take on and push forward various architectural styles as the prevailing winds shifted. Major works by Johnson in the 1970s included the Johnson building addition to Boston Public Library (1972)—a case study in contextual design with a Kahn-ian approach to geometry—the IDS Center, Minneapolis (1973) and Pennzoil Place, Houston (1970-76)—both of which exemplify a Late Modernist use of mirrored glass curtain walls. Johnson was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1979 and in the same year was one of the few architects ever to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine, where he is pictured holding a model of his seminal Postmodern work—the AT&T Building (550 Madison, NYC, 1978-84).
New Players On the Scene
While many prominent architects of the Modern Movement were reaching the end or late stages of their careers, other major players in the 1970s included architects who were trained in the Modernist school of thought and either continued within this strain—while pushing its bounds—or diverged entirely, and sometimes both. Architects like Paul Rudolph, John Portman, William Pereira, I.M. Pei, and larger firms such as SOM, HOK, and Gruen Associates, continued to produce influential work in the 1970s—generally working on large-scale commercial and institutional projects, and in some cases beginning to expand into massive projects abroad, particularly in the Middle East and Asia toward the end of the decade. Architects who were becoming more prominent during the 1970s included Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (successors to Eero Saarinen’s firm upon his death in 1961), Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman and Margret McCurry, Charles Gwathmey, and Frank Gehry, among many others. As these architects were coming into maturity in the 1970s, they were experimenting with various continuations and divergences from Modernism, and developing the material, formal, and linguistic framework that would shape the profession through the remainder of the twentieth century.
Whites vs. Grays
The exhibition and publication Five Architects (1972, reprinted 1975) was born out of several meetings hosted at MoMA of the Committee of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE)—first in 1969 and again in 1971—and featured the work of Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, and Meier, who would become known as the "New York Five" (a play on the earlier Modernist “Harvard Five” of the 1940s) or the "Whites." The Whites moniker referred to the architects’ proclivity for white exterior facades, the vein of Corbusier's villas, and the white cardboard architectural models that they presented. While this publication helped launch the careers of these architects into the mainstream of the architectural press, the Whites were not without their opponents and detractors. As architectural historian Leland M. Roth has observed,
Responding to this exhibition, and arraying themselves against the Whites were another group of young architects, whose spokesman, Robert Stern, call the ‘Grays.’ They believed that architecture, although a formal expression, works best when it acknowledges its context and incorporates allusions to the past, even references that are humorous and ironic. Both groups stemmed from Louis Kahn, but whereas the Whites moved sharply in the direction of Le Corbusier in the 1920s, toward abstraction, the Grays followed the trail blazed by Venturi.(6)
The Grays would become generally associated with Venturi, Moore, Stern, and architectural historian Vincent Scully (and Graves, who switched camps), and “new Classical” architecture, proto-Postmodernism, and vernacular architecture. The two camps represented two strains or directions in architecture in the 1970s that had numerous subcurrents, off-shoots, and responses. One such response came out of Los Angeles in a series of conferences hosted by Tim Vreeland, an architect teaching at UCLA, that featured architects such as Cesar Pelli, Anthony Lumsden, Eugene Kupper, Paul Kennon, and Frank Dimster, who dubbed themselves the “Silvers” in reference to their sleek, high tech approach to Late Modern design.(7)
Minority and Woman Architects
Unfortunately, it is unsurprising that the architects, theorists, and "schools" whose work dominated architectural competitions and awards and graced the covers of establishment architecture periodicals in the 1970s were by-and-large white men. However, the profession was seeing a shift in the 70s as more women, African American and other minority students were enrolling in architecture programs and becoming licensed architects. The political movements in the 1960s striving for equality and civil rights resulted in integration of graduate and professional programs and more conscious efforts to grant opportunities to women- and minority-owned businesses in public projects, which opened the possibilities for a more diverse profession (although the profession, to this day, continues to suffer from a severe lack of diversity).
In 1971, the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) was founded by twelve African American architects—William Brown, Leroy Campbell, Wendell Campbell, John S. Chase, James C. Dodd, Kenneth B. Groggs, Nelson Harris, Jeh Johnson, E.H. McDowell, Robert J. Nash, Harold Williams, and Robert Wilson—who met at the annual AIA National Convention in Detroit that year. NOMA, whose mission as currently stated is "rooted in a rich legacy of activism, is to empower our local chapters and membership to foster justice and equity in communities of color through outreach, community advocacy, professional development and design excellence," has chapters across the country, including many affiliated student organizations at architecture schools.(9)
The 1974 Women in Architecture Symposium was held at Washington University in St. Louis, focused on challenges faced by women in the male-dominated profession, garnered national media attention, and inspired other symposia, events, and discussions in cities and institutions across the country. A 1977 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Women in Architecture, organized by architect Susana Torre, was featured in Progressive Architecture (March 1977) and was accompanied by the publication Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective. Although women, African American, and other minority architects made strides in the 1970s, their names and work still remained less celebrated in the mainstream architectural press, especially at a national level, and thus local research and oral histories with living architects will be needed to supplement other research methods in order to piece together a full picture of architecture in the 1970s. Indeed it is only recently, that the profession has begun to better recognize the work of architects such as Denise Scott Brown (whose contributions were previously overlooked and credited only to Venturi, her husband and design partner) and Norma Merrick Sklarek (the first African American woman elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and whose work is often attributed only to the large firms at which she was employed—Gruen and Associates and Welton Becket Associates).(10)
Conclusion
1970s architecture is in what curator and critic Mimi Zeiger has called the “ugly valley”—the bottom of the ever-revolving cycles of taste—and already we have seen the loss of notable examples of 70s architecture. However, like with Modernist architecture before and Victorian architecture before that, there will likely be a broader appreciation of the aesthetics of 1970s architecture over the next decade or so—but not without effort. We have already seen this struggle around Brutalist architecture, which has a wider cult following thanks to social media and photography, but still is widely under threat and not valued by all. Design and planning of the 70s is yet understudied, and numerous avenues of research await, particularly at the local and regional levels. Docomomo US, along with other architects, architectural historians, advocates, and local community members, will be at the front lines of establishing both an understanding and appreciation of 1970s architecture in the years to come.
Sources
(1) Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966, 1977, 2002).
(2)Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 17.
(3) Arthur Drexler, “Preface,” in The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts, catalog for an exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (October 29, 1975-January 4, 1976).
(4) In an interesting further twist, Torre’s own work became increasingly Postmodern and Stephens, an architecture critic, would go on to favorably review works by Stern and the like.
(5) Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modern Architecture: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 9.
(6)Leland M. Roth, American Architecture: A History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 489.
(7)Daniel Paul, SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement: Late Modern, 1966-1990, prepared for City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning, Office of Historic Resources (July 2020).
(8)Daniel Paul, SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement: Postmodernism, 1965-1991, prepared for City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning, Office of Historic Resources (July 2018).
(9)“About,” National Organization of Minority Architects, accessed August 3, 2020, https://www.noma.net/about-noma/.
(10) The “Pioneering Women of Architecture” initiative by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation is a great resource with a growing repository of information, see https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/.
(11)“Escape from Ugly Valley: A Conversation on Time and Taste,” conference session moderated by Mimi Zeiger, Preserving the Recent Past 3 (PRP3), Los Angeles, California, March 13-16. https://www.prp3.org/program.
About
Hannah Lise Simonsonreceived her Master's of Science in Historic Preservation at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture in 2017.Her thesis "Modern Diamond Heights:Dwell-ification and the Challenges of Preserving Modernist, Redevelopment Resources in Diamond Heights, San Francisco," was awarded the Outstanding Thesis in Historic Preservation by the UT Austin School of Architecture. She is currentlyan Architectural Historian & Cultural Resources Planner at Page & Turnbull in downtown San Francisco. She also serves as the President of the Docomomo US/Northern California (NOCA) chapter and as a member of the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project's Advisory Committee.
