Preserving and Researching Modern Architecture Outside of the Canon: A View from the Field

Abstract

Lydia Mattice Brandt University of South Carolina Preserving and Researching Modern Architecture Outside of the Canon: A View from the Field Two mid-twentieth-centuryfederal buildings stand next to one another in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. Marcel Breuer designed the Strom Thurmond Federal Building and United States Courthouse in 1975-9 (Figure 1). The General Services Administration, the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, and the National Park Service deemed the rawconcrete tower ofBreuer'sbuilding architecturally significant enough to nominate it to the National Register of Historic Places years ahead of its fiftieth birthday (the usual temporal benchmark for designation as an ''historic"building).1 Its neighbor , a five-story, International Style office building constructed for the Veterans Administration in 1948-51, has recently been slated for demolition to make room for a parking lot.2 William G. Lyles, Thomas J. Bissett, William A. Carlisle, and Louis M. Wolff were among the consortium of local architects who designed the VA Building (Figure 2). At the same time, these four men formed LBC&W, a firm that would work on thousands ofarchitecture, planning, and engineering projects across the Southeast over the next thirty years. But while the Bauhaus -affiliated Breuer occupies a solid position in the history ofmodern architecture,you've probably never heard ofLBC&W. As its buildings disappear, you might never get the chance. At a time when even works by such world-renowned architects as Paul Rudolph and Frank Lloyd Wright face demolition, the glass towers, concrete plazas, and minimalist shopping centers designed by small town architects like LBC&W are among America's most threatened architectural resources.3 What do we-as preservationists, researchers, and educatorsknow about these buildings and their architects? What arguments can we make for their significance? Are they even worth saving? The history of local modernism presents special opportunities and challenges. Over the past year, I have begun to use LBC&W's oeuvre as alaboratoryfor studying and teaching mid-century modern architecture.4 My aim is to develop arguments for the significance ofthese buildings and to determine 72 new ways to tell the story ofmodern architecture in America. The study of local mid-twentieth-century architecture reveals issues often ignored in modernism's master narrative but that were central to America's experience ofthe movement. It transcends the ideal ofthe singular creative genius that dominates the history modernism cultivated by architects (both Wright and Louis Sullivan wrote their autobiographies in the third person). Recently, architectural historians have begun to lookto the draftsmen (and draftswomen),the interior designers, and even the clients behind the masters.5 Examinations ofmodernism on a local scale make such pursuits even easier: without the weight ofa master's biography, a far more nuanced narrative ofthe commission, design, and constructionprocesses is possible. So how do we begin evaluating a building like LBC&W's Banker's Trust Tower of 1974 (Figure 3), one of the dominant structures ofColumbia's skyline? Is it derivative ofMies van der Rohe's 1958 Seagram Building? Sure. It would be a waste of time to try to argue that it rivals Mies's tower; it lacked the Seagram 's extraordinary construction and maintenance budgets, as well as what William Jordy identified as the ''laconic splendor of the metal frame:'6 Butitis crucial to underscore the fact that the Banker's Trust Tower, and other structures like it,were how most Americans experienced modernism. Louis Wolff, lead designer for LBC&W, published an article in the 1953 edition ofSouth CarolinaMagazineentitled"ModernArchitecture- Its Purposes and Aims" for a lay audience.7 In a popularjournal likely to sit on many ofhis potential clients' coffee tables,Wolfflaid out such modern dictums as "form follows function"and the importance ofcity planning. Through such clever marketing,Wolffand his firm convinced their conservative Southern citythat modernism was accessible and desirable. The success ofsuch efforts should not be overlooked. In order to argue for a deeper significance of such buildings, we need to admit that they are watered down versions ofworks well situated in the canon-and then move on. Examination oflocal modern architecture also makes room FIELD NO TE S Figure 1. In the foreground : Lafaye, Lafaye and Fair an d Stork and Lyles. Associated Architects. with Wa lter F. Petty, Bissett, Carlisle and Wolff, Veterans Ad mi...