[UPDATE added. See further down. —MJ]
A post about Sony cameras the other day sparked a conversation about an architectural style called "Brutalism" because I mentioned it in a parenthetical comment. From various commenters I learned a little about that. This morning we got another comment from a reader, Phil, who lived at the Barbican for 15 years. I appreciate hearing about things like Brutalism from different perspectives, although in this case it doesn't bring me a centimeter closer to liking it. This post is meant to be about something else entirely, but I'll start with the architecture.
Is this Brutalism? The photograph, from Shorpy, comes from the early 1960s. It's the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, on the lakefront in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was dedicated on Veteran's Day 1957, the year I was born. I can't find very much online about it as a building or as architecture. It does appear to be made mostly of raw concrete, although it's doubtless steel underneath that forms the slender-looking supports. It has large mosaics on the street-facing facade, which seems, from my limited understanding, to also be a not-uncommon aspect of the Brutalist style. The building was designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who also designed the St. Louis Arch and a number of still-famous public buildings including the passenger terminal at Dulles Airport. Public architecture is not one of "my" arts, the ones I follow and feel affinity toward, but I probably know more about Saarinen's work than that of any other, excepting maybe Wright whose work everyone knows. Saarinen passed away only four years after the War Memorial Center was dedicated. More's the pity; he certainly had much more to give. He accomplished a lot in a lifetime of only 51 years.
The picture shows the building the way Saarinen obviously meant it to be seen, crowning a pristine hill. To me it doesn't fit the Brutalist category because it was clearly meant to look like its mass is floating above the ground, giving a visual impression of weightlessness. The hill it's on, shown so nicely here, was meant to be part of the whole. Unfortunately, developers and planners can't stand open land, especially when it's just a visual prospect setting off a view of a building that was designed to fit there. American practicality has no use, and less respect, for mere views. The base of the building you see here was extended way out toward the lake, and the space where the hill used to be is now cluttered with a mess of bits and pieces of other structures. The War Memorial Center itself has been rendered dated and almost dowdy-looking by the newer and more glamorous sibling pressing up against it from next door, Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion, which is literally several shades brighter, making this building look as drab as a rainy day by comparison. Curiously, both serve or served as the Milwaukee Art Museum, and yet both are more or less useless for that purpose. There are galleries underneath the War Memorial Center, and most of the dramatic spaces in the Quadracci Pavilion are not very functional for showing art. The buildings themselves might be art. But the actual art galleries in both cases seem to be afterthoughts.
Okay, too much intro, but I couldn't help relating it to the architectural discussion that flowed out of the Sony design post.
[UPDATE: Finally found a picture of the War Memorial Center as it is now. The photo by Bill Cobb is undated as far as I could find out. The old picture is taken from the Northeast, and Bill Cobb's is more from the Southeast, and from the air. But you can get an idea of how much of the original hill is gone and how much has been built up around the 1957 building. —MJ]
Running up that hill
Here's the point I wanted to make. It's that we all bring ourselves to photographs, and to art, and the complex meaning artworks possess is a construct in our minds that relate to many things: not only our personal associations, connotations, and memories, but things like our existing relationships to taste, our calcified pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, our prejudices and so on. A person who has already decided their "stance" toward modern art, say, or to neoclassical government buildings, can't come to new examples of those things with minds that are completely open in the usual sense.
In this case, I can't view this picture without remembering that I once played on that hill. I lived right at what was then the northernmost edge of the Milwaukee metropolitan area from age five to age 18. I also can't see this picture without the knowledge that that hill is no longer there as it was. Nor can I shake off a minor but ancient resentment against whoever had a part in deciding to disrespect Eero Saarinen's artistic intentions by obliterating the hill. It seems obvious to me that he intended the building to fit its space and its surroundings—but the space and surroundings as they existed in 1957.
More globally, I've come to realize that what appears to be the most solid and lasting form of art—architecture—is often actually among the most ephemeral. No one wants to destroy a 350-year-old Vermeer—quite the contrary—but buildings have a lifespan. They age, they need to be updated, their uses change, their meaning relative to the "now" of when they were new changes, funding for maintenance increases and becomes burdensome. Their visual effect is spoiled by remodeling, sometimes called "remuddling" when it is ham-handedly or ignorantly done, and sometimes they're simply obscured by new things built in the way. And, often sooner rather than later, many buildings, even great ones carefully designed and expensively constructed, come under the wrecker's ball. When they're torn down they're gone. All that remain are photographs.
And sometimes the tokens and talismans of older worlds that do remain are not exactly representative. One of the Foxfire books made the point that early log cabins are believed to have been sturdily and expertly constructed, but that's not true, because only the tiny fraction of them that survived were made like that—all the rest fell down! There used to be a log cabin in what is now my front yard, with slits cut in the logs so muskets could poke out and scare away the Seneca, but when entropy finally threatened to overwhelm it, money could not be found for its preservation. I inherited a photograph. It lasted from the 1700s to the 1970s, which ain't too shabby for a shabby old log box.
But back to Eero Saarinen's creation. There used to be an open-air Art Fair held on the lawns at the bottom of that hill every year, by the shore of Lake Michigan, and when my age was still in the single digits my mother would take us to see it. I loved to draw, and I loved to look at art in books, and I studied that building long and hard from the viewpoint of this photograph. She explained to me that it was supposed to appear as if it was floating, and I was both enchanted and disturbed by the effect. It looked ethereal but also unstable. She explained that it was designed by a great architect with a funny name (my parents were Brad and Jane, and we were Mike, Charlie, and Scott. My maternal grandparents were John and Mary, and their daughters were Ann, Jane, and Mary. I did not come from people who brooked much in the way of creativity or adventure regarding given names). The War Memorial Center might have been the first work of non-residential architecture I engaged with in a serious way. It fascinated me for a long time, and yet, at the same time, never completely satisfied me as a work of art, and not only because you couldn't see it all at once.
The art shown at the Fair also had that ambiguous effect on me. I remember one piece that consisted of a polished aluminum box the size of a casket, with what appeared to be a small torn hole sculpted in the top, modeled as if a projectile had burst through it from the underside; and if you got your ear close enough to the hole you could hear a high-pitched tone coming from inside. I was delighted by it, but I was also strongly curious as to why and how on earth it was considered art, and what its ultimate purpose could possibly be.
All of these things are "in" me, and I bring them all to this workmanlike 4x5-inch transparency that was taken in or near 1962 by Balthazar Korab. (And by the way, this picture is a good example of why I tend not to like color. The colors here are just off, polluted with other colors, although they reek of Ektachrome transparencies so much that I almost viscerally sense the substrate as transparent even though that doesn't exist on the screen. I find such not-quite-right colors disturbing, and most color in most color photographs is similarly off. I suspect that's why I've always liked dye transfer prints—the yellows, especially, tend to be unpolluted—and inkjet prints, which can bring relief as well. I've always related this affliction of mine to the way Edgar Degas saw flowers; he found their riotous colors and crowded fractal irregularity disturbing, and I read once, when I was still in my teens, that he only painted a vase of flowers forthrightly one time in his life before reconstituting his aversion to them again. Not sure if that's really true.)
Anyway the building is still there, but its aspect, meaning, and aesthetic impression have all changed. This photograph is probably the closest thing that exists to what the architect intended, and it's the closest thing to my memory of it as well. Here you can see a larger version.
Mike
ADDENDUM: Lois said: "Ugh! It's now a parking lot. Check Google Street View. Interesting article—as always."
Mike replies: Great idea, and yes, ugh. Here's the closest I could come using Google Street view to the vantage point that the 1962 picture was taken from, the prospect of the building looking from the Northeast:
I was limited by the restricted movement of the Street View camera van, but surprised that it photographed at all inside the parking lot.
Here's the satellite view. I put a red dot at the approximate location of the Street View crop above, which is probably within a 30-foot radius of where Balthazar Korab was standing in 1962.
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Featured Comments from:
[Ed. note: Whenever we stumble adventitiously upon a new topic, the comments are usually extremely good, because we hit a fresh vein in our readership's far-flung knowledge and experience. (I mean like a vein in a mineral mine, not in the body!) I've posted too many "Featured" comments below, but even so, many of the ones I didn't feature are excellent. If this topic grabbed you, I urge you to read all the comments in the full Comments Section, accessible by clicking on the link at the very bottom of the post or by clicking on the title and scrolling down.]
Bryan Geyer: "Beginning in 1957, at the end of the Lockheed L-1049 Constellation prop-plane days, and then into the jet age, when Trans World Airlines (TWA) introduced (1959) the new 707, I flew (first class) frequently between California and New York City. TWA was already my preferred carrier. They had prettier stewardesses, better food/drink, and better seating. And then, in 1962, came Eero Saarinen’s new TWA Flight Center at JFK airport. The structure was a revelation, and entirely unlike any public point of assembly that I’d ever seen. You’d deplane into elegant curving tubes—it was akin to being absorbed—and there was no apparent noise because there were no parallel surfaces. The central terminal was entirely open, at all of various levels, with gently curving concrete and tile stairways that served to access the waiting areas, the bars and restaurants, the ticketing, and the baggage claim—with all of it drenched in a cloak of quiet calm. Arrival and departure was always a pleasurable experience, every time, until TWA’s regrettable demise."
Joel Becker: "Re 'The buildings themselves might be art. But the actual art galleries in both cases seem to be afterthoughts': Stewart Brand's seminal How Buildings Learn actually covers this topic quite well. Architecture that assumes a building's use will never change and tries to achieve a perfect design for that planned use ends up trapped, while architecture that allows and expects for evolution ends up creating more useful, and more beautiful, structures over time."
Jack Mac: "When you and I lived in Milwaukee I knew this building well. A friend is leading an effort to preserve the building as it has has a lot of deferred maintenance. Too bad Eero didn’t make it out of stainless steel as he did the St. Louis Arch. I am happy to report the St. Louis Arch has been well maintained with public and private money. It’s fun to photograph, and you can take a vertical tram to the top. Unfortunately when you are at the top, you can no longer see the wonderful Arch, as you are in it!"
Jeff Markus: "The caption under the larger version of the photo claims it to be a Kodachrome, but it sure looks like Ektachrome to me too. In particular, Ektachrome which has begun to dark fade, and will go more and more magenta in the future, eventually becoming pretty much all magenta and nothing else. Nasty looking. So far as I know, that is inevitable for the pre-E6 materials. Maybe E6 too, don't know. The greens in particular look terrible. Kodachromes, on the other hand, keep very well. There was book done of FSA Kodachromes done a while back and the images still looked fresh. Mike, I bet you have a copy of that.
"A friend of mine has some very well-known old Kodachromes, the Marilyn Monroe nudes on red velvet series. These are 8x10 transparencies that were close to 40 years old at the time I saw them and looked as if they had just been shot that week. Originally done as calendar art, some were later used for the premier issue of Playboy."
John McMillin: "Here's another building in Denver that's considered Brutalist. It's a TV news headquarters that's being demolished soon. Note the base of the building is recessed behind the exterior walls, as if the building sits on a small pedestal. The entrances are shaded and not obviously marked by the architecture. This follows the same principle as that Milwaukee building, though it's more constrained and less dramatic. The architects were aiming for a parlour trick, like making an elephant levitate.
"The literal translation of the French is 'raw, unrefined.' The hallmark feature of Brutalist architecture is a rough concrete aggregate wall that hasn't been textured or decorated. Add in a rigorous commitment to geometry and you have a style that was sold as a progressive reform of 19th century Art Deco and Neoclassical ornamentation—but it was also a handy shortcut for stingy governments and builders who sought the most square feet for the lowest cost.
"Today, few but art historians shed any tears for Brutalist buildings, which are aging out and deteriorating. They are the visual signature of totalitarian cities, in film and in fact. I dislike most of them. My daughter's elementary school, built in the early sixties, was like a bunker. There was zero natural light. The only classroom windows were puzzlingly located in the closets, a 3'x3' panel below waist level. Why? Who knows! [Fire escapes? —MJ] It was the postwar boom, when everybody was still drinking off their PTSD from the war."
John Krumm: "That new white building made me laugh (the one in the update link). Looks like a sailboat bisecting a cruise ship. Our library in Duluth, Minnesota, is kind of a local brutalist design that also brings to mind a ship, albeit a space ship...it's supposed to be an ore boat."
Mike replies: You ain't seen nuthin' yet. You should see the new white building with its "sails" out. Do a Google Image Search for "Quadracci Pavilion" (a.k.a. Calatrava addition) to see the building's echoes of sails, which has become the symbol of the City of Milwaukee.
Kristine Hinrichs: "As this is one of my favorite/most underappreciated buildings in Milwaukee and I’m there weekly, I have to chime in. One of the more interesting details is how Santiago Calatrava used elements from the War Memorial in his design—the shape of the railings in both structures are almost identical, Calatrava carried that rectangular element you see in the windows onto the plaza and other areas, etc. If you look at photos of Saarinen’s TWA terminal (now hotel) at JFK you can see his influence on Calatrava. This complex features the work of two national and two significant local architects—the War Memorial, Kahler addition; Calatrava, and Shields addition. Although the Milwaukee Art Museum is easily the most photographed structure in Milwaukee, I urge photographers to also visit the War Memorial."
Phil: "Re '[Buildings] age, they need to be updated, their uses change, their meaning relative to the "now" of when they were new changes, funding for maintenance increases and becomes burdensome.' Have you read or watched Stewart Brand's 'How Buildings Learn'? You might find it interesting. He's put the six TV episodes on YouTube; here's the first. The book is good too. Here's my summary, which Stewart Brand liked."
Mike replies: The book is great, but I've never seen the video version. I will now. Actually, I didn't know a video version existed.
John Custodio: "The bad color in the Shorpy transparency is more likely due to some degree of fading in the cyan layer (a red shift in the shadows and in the sky). It's a Kodachrome (from the info on the Shorpy website), but the fading would probably have been worse if it was an Ektachrome.
"I put a curve on it in Photoshop which decreased the red channel in the shadows and decreased some of the red in the sky. Also brought up the black level in the shadows to compensate for the decrease in red."
jp41: "Mike, this article is fantastic! Learning about photographer Balthazar Korab and his 1962 image of the Milwaukee County War Memorial is wonderful. I saw this mid-century modern building in 2013 and captured a single set of bracketed exposures, as my attention was focused on photographing the Milwaukee Art Museum. Had I known this was an Eero Saarinen creation, I would have definitely dedicated more time to it. Above is how it looked in August 2013."
Dave Glos: "That post was a thrilling ride. Love the hard right turn, fleshing out 'parenthetical' remarks from a discourse on camera design into a vibrant, deeply personal discourse on your connection to a modernist building from your childhood, then adding touches on our present relationship to architecture, plus side comments on wonky color. Moreover, everything you wrote resonated with my perspectives. Gluing disparate threads into a cohesive narrative that relates to some aspect of photography is a gift which drives me to read The Online Photographer. Thank you.
"In high school, I had a strong interest in being an architect, but talked myself out of it, likely the better for all, and pursued engineering. My consolation prize was an elective, Architectural Appreciation, which included a field trip to the modern architectural mecca of Columbus, Indiana as the grand finale. That experience is cherished, and drives my desire to expand my knowledge. I’ve had the great luck to visit several Frank Lloyd homes, including Falling Water, see many fantastic museums in spectacular buildings and spaces, travel to Barcelona to experience Antoni Gaudi’s phantasmagorical creations, and be engrossed by ancient ruins in Greece. Great architecture and spaces touch me at a fundamental level, making me feel alive and grateful."
