[MUSIC PLAYING]
How did these 10
buildings change America?
This Frank Lloyd
Wright house might
have inspired the
design for your house.
This New York
skyscraper just may
have been the model for
your office building.
And copies of this
Boston landmark
are probably all around you.
I'm Geoffrey Baer.
In this show, I'll be
crisscrossing the country
to visit 10 buildings
that changed
the way we all live,
work, and play.
Houses, skyscrapers, a
factory, and an airport.
Even a shopping mall.
Just take a look.
Each of these buildings was
revolutionary in its time,
and then went on to
be a trendsetter.
This building is not
like all those knockoffs.
We'll go inside these
seminal structures
to see what makes
them extraordinary.
The most complicated piece
to build is right there.
We'll meet the daring architects
and adventuresome clients
who brought the
buildings to life.
If you're going to
build a building,
then you do the best
building that you can.
And we'll discover the shocking,
funny, and even sad stories
of how these
buildings came to be.
By the time this
show is finished,
you'll look at
buildings all around you
in a totally different way.
Because they just may have been
inspired by these 10 buildings
that changed America.
From Washington, DC,
to Madison, Wisconsin,
and all over America,
government buildings
often look like Greek
and Roman temples.
So where did this
tradition begin?
The answer is in
Richmond, Virginia,
where we start our
journey through time
with the oldest of
our 10 buildings.
When Thomas Jefferson first
laid eyes on this building,
he wasn't happy.
He is not pleased.
The founding father and
self-taught architect
had designed the
Virginia State Capitol
while living 4,000 miles away.
Jefferson is
contacted in France.
But when he got
back to Richmond,
he found his building
had been enlarged,
the offices were
moved to the basement,
and his grand front
steps were eliminated.
He comes back and he realizes
there are no front steps.
This was always
intended, that there
would be these
magnificent front steps.
That you would
come up this hill.
There would be this
temple on the hilltop.
A decade after Thomas Jefferson
penned the Declaration
of Independence, this
building was sort of
like his declaration of
architectural independence
from Britain.
You see, he never really liked
the Colonial architecture
of Virginia.
As an architect, it offended
Jefferson's sense of style.
And as a revolutionary, it
clashed with his politics.
This was, after all, Georgian
architecture, a style
imported from Britain
and named for its kings.
Even the name,
Georgian architecture.
It was horrible.
Jefferson hated kings and the
Declaration of Independence
is essentially his Dear
John letter to George III.
Jefferson was invited to
create a new face for Virginia
while he was serving as
America's Minister to France.
But he didn't find his
architectural inspirational
in the court of King Louis XVI.
Instead, Jefferson
looked back to
the great classical
buildings of Rome,
which he knew so well from
his architecture books.
He liked the clean lines.
He liked the symmetry.
And this was his statement
about the new nation being
a part of the Western world,
but not being beholden
to Great Britain.
But rather than simply borrow
ideas from the ancients,
Thomas Jefferson decided
to do something unheard of.
His state capitol would be
a copy of an actual Roman
temple, the Maison Carree
in the south of France.
Jefferson writes
somewhat lasciviously
about his first face-to-face
encounter with the temple.
"Here I am, gazing whole
hours at the Maison Carree,
like a lover at his mistress.
And the reason why you
picks the Maison Carree,
a square building, is
to embody ancient ideals
of pure geometry.
The Maison Carree is a
one-room windowless temple, not
an ideal vessel for
state government.
So with the help of French
architect Charles-Louis
Clerisseau, Jefferson made
a few practical changes.
While the Maison Carree sported
fancy Corinthian columns,
he thought the
workmen in Virginia
could only handle
simpler, ionic ones.
Because the ionic order
are much easier to carve.
And where, in a
Roman temple, there
might have been a
statue of a god,
Jefferson planned for a statue
of America's first president.
It looks remarkably
different from the image
of George Washington
we all know.
I don't think that's
the same likeness.
In fact, this is considered
the most accurate likeness
we have Washington.
It was based on an
actual mold of his face.
He is not presented as a king.
Notice that there is a
missing button on the coat.
There's a slight
swelling to the belly--
[LAUGHTER]
--one might say there.
Jefferson may have been
an ocean away in France,
but he still tried to
micromanage construction
of the capitol.
He shipped this scale
model back to Virginia,
which remarkably survives today.
Plus, these obsessively
detailed drawings.
This was an obsessive individual
with many different area.
[LAUGHTER]
He sometimes would
draw up his buildings
with measurements down to
one one-hundredth of an inch.
Now, can you imagine a
workman looking at that?
It's likely that some of
those workmen were slaves.
Jefferson suggested
that slaves work
under the direction of
an expert stone-cutter.
This is similar
to the arrangement
he used to build his
home, Monticello.
So this is something that he
would have been very, very
familiar with from
his own experiences.
But Thomas Jefferson's
attempts to oversee the project
from afar fell apart.
His plans took months
to reach Richmond.
In the meantime,
legislatures grew impatient
and the builder broke ground on
an entirely different design.
Once the plans do get
over here, they've
already started the building.
They've already got
a foundation there.
And that resulted in some
of those troublesome changes
to Jefferson's design, like
leaving off his grand front
steps, which wouldn't be
added until after his death.
Still, Jefferson's
building would
change American architecture.
The Virginia State Capitol
inspired American architects
to use the classical temple
form as the official face
of this new nation.
This was the first
republic of the modern era
to turn away from
monarchy permanently.
And this was a radical, it
was new, it was dangerous.
And they announced all of this
with Greco-Roman architecture.
Wherever you live
in America, you've
probably seen buildings that
look like this Boston landmark.
Churches, city halls,
and post offices
with heavy walls of rough
faced stone, round arches,
and massive towers.
This style is called
Richardsonian Romanesque,
and it was born right
here at Trinity Church.
The architect, much like his
building, was mountainous.
He weighed, in his
prime-- if that
was what we could call
it-- over 300 pounds.
H. H. Richardson was a
celebrity in the 1880s who
famously dressed in a
Medieval monk's robe
and lived a very short life.
He got his chance to change the
face of American architecture
when he was just
33-- this invitation
to compete for the job of
designing Trinity Church.
Richardson flipped
the invitation over
and sketched this
design on the back.
This little sketch is really
the embryo of this church.
It's like the conception
of a baby in the womb.
Richardson made his visionary
sketch with one man in mind--
Phillips Brooks was the
rector of Trinity Church.
Today, he's best remembered
as the writer of the Christmas
song "O Little Town of
Bethlehem," but in hi time
he was known as a
spellbinding preacher who
drew enormous crowds.
The church is an
envelope for his voice.
Richardson designed Trinity
as a compact cross, which
would draw more than 1,400
parishioners around rooks
in a sanctuary adorned by some
of the great decorative artists
of the day.
It's a space that draws you in.
You walk in and you
immediately feel
that you're part
of a congregation.
The other key to Richardson's
influential design
was something of
a happy accident.
Richardson originally
drew up Trinity
with a tall, spindly tower,
but the building's engineers
knew that idea was
literally on shaky ground.
The engineers said, no.
You can't do that.
You see, this Boston's Back Bay,
a man-made piece of real estate
that had been created by filling
in an old marsh with gravel
and sand.
The engineers knew the
unstable ground here just
couldn't support
such a tall tower.
So Richardson was
forced to adopt
what would become Trinity's
defining feature--
a broad, earthbound tower.
It's held up by
four piers, which
run down through the
corners of the sanctuary
where they won't block
views of the preacher.
These piers are supported
by huge granite footings
below the church, which rests on
4,500 wood pilings, essentially
tree trunks, that were driven
into the gravelly ground.
And they push each other
so that they're stable.
The broad tower
and boxy sanctuary
came together to make
that mountainous form,
which Richardson
married with his take
on the muscular Romanesque
style of Medieval Europe.
The result was something
entirely new-- Richardsonian
Romanesque.
It's a fantastic
kind of architecture.
It's very massive with
these fantastic arches
and this articulated
masonry that really looks
as if it was chiseled right
out of rock on the site.
It's a style with Old
World roots transformed
into something fresh
and distinctly American.
This grew out of a golden
age after the Civil War,
when the nation's painters,
writers, and architects
were all enjoying a so-called
American Renaissance.
Richardson's work
as an architect
reflected the sense of
optimism and exuberance
about the American future.
Richardson would die at
age 47, just nine years
after completing Trinity.
But his Richardsonian
Romanesque lived on.
This style that
was born in Boston
was adopted by other
architects across America.
Richardsonian Romanesque
took America by storm.
It's everywhere.
And it really goes to building
type to building type.
It can be a church.
It can be a library.
These were institutions
that were building a nation.
They all wanted to make
that same message--
that they were there to stay.
And I would suggest that
it was its solidity.
Its sense of having
been there a long time
and likely to be there a
long time in the future.
It might seem an obvious.
Skyscrapers should look tall.
But they never did until
this Saint Louis skyscraper
reached toward the
heavens in 1891.
The thing about the Wainwright
that's so extraordinary
is it's the first building
that revels in the height.
Not just that it can
go up the ten stories,
but that it can do
that in a lyrical way.
Louis Sullivan claimed to
have designed the Wainwright
building in just three minutes.
But in reality, he was building
on a decade of discoveries
by other architects.
The skyscraper was
born in the 1880s, when
growing American
corporations were competing
for prime downtown office
space in New York and Chicago.
That drove real estate
prices through the roof.
So the clients
and the architects
want to figure out how to make
buildings that are taller.
Architects answered the
call with new technologies,
most importantly something
called skeleton frame
construction.
Instead of holding
up their buildings
with thick masonry walls
of brick and stone,
architects found a new way
to support tall buildings
with thin metal frames and
the walls were mostly there
to keep people
inside warm and dry.
Another invention that make
the skyscraper possible
was the passenger elevator.
After all, who wants to
work in a ten story walk-up?
Ten, please.
So architects had
all the technology
they needed to build
tall, but they still
hadn't figured out what tall
buildings should look like.
So a lot of tall buildings look
like short buildings just made
bigger.
Or, like, in some cases even,
two or three short buildings
piled on top of each other.
Louis Sullivan felt this
new American invention
known as the skyscraper
called for a new approach.
"The skyscraper," he wrote,
"must be every inch a proud
and soaring thing."
Height was not just a fact, but
it was also an aesthetic idea.
And yet when Sullivan sat
down to design this skyscraper
for beer brewer Ellis Wainwright
and his mother Catherine,
the architect was
reportedly stumped.
So he went for a walk
to clear his head.
The fresh air must've
done him some good,
because as Sullivan walked
down this Chicago street,
the design suddenly came to him.
He rushed back inside and fired
off his famous three minute
sketch.
Sullivan threw the
sketch down on the table
of his young draftsman,
Frank Lloyd Wright.
And the Wainwright
Building in Saint Louis--
More than 60 years later,
Wright recalled the moment
when the Wainwright
Building was born.
He said, Wright,
this thing is tall.
What's the matter
with a tall building?
And there it was.
Tall.
So how did Sullivan
make the skyscraper
soar despite the fact that
it's only ten stories tall?
Well, for starters, he
divided the building
into three parts, what's
known as a tripartite design.
First, there's the
two-story base.
Two stories visually
made it look solid.
But it also gave it that kind
of comfortable human scale.
Then, above the base,
you here have floor
upon floor of identical offices.
This second part is
where Sullivan really
draws your eye upward.
The horizontal
elements, or spandrels,
are recessed while the
vertical piers project
without interruption
for seven stories.
Almost until it reaches
the top of the building.
But then, a building
has to end somewhere.
That's the third
party of the building.
And so then, these
vertical lines,
as they reach the very top,
suddenly burst into ornament.
The terracotta ornament
doesn't feature
the columns of ancient
Greece and Rome.
Instead, Sullivan
looks to nature.
All the while,
Sullivan doesn't let
us forget the technology
that made skyscrapers
possible in the first place.
While earlier skyscrapers
almost seemed ashamed
of their steel frames,
the Wainwright Building
emphasizes its skeleton.
The steel frame's the
essence of the building.
It's what makes it stand.
It's symbolic of the time.
It's symbolic of the technology.
The Wainwright
Building set the tone
for the next century of
skyscraper construction.
Skyscrapers would continue
to celebrate their height,
and they would continue to
show off their steel frames.
But ultimately, Sullivan felt
the best form of flattery
was not imitation,
but individualism.
Part of what Sullivan felt
was important about the United
States and America was the
power of the individual
to express themselves for
the benefit of everybody.
And if you have each person
taking their own talents
and bringing buildings
vibrantly alive,
you are creating an
American architecture.
We're visiting 10 buildings
that changed America
in chronological
order, and we've
come to our fourth building.
It's architect
called it a source
of worldwide
architectural inspiration.
Humility wasn't Frank
Lloyd Wright's strong suit.
You see, early in life I to
choose between honest arrogance
and hypocritical humility.
I chose honest arrogance.
The Robie House really
was a radical departure
from your typical middle-class
house at the time, which
tended to look like a tall box.
Ever since he left
Louis Sullivan's office,
Frank Lloyd Wright had
been gradually thinking
outside the box in a series of
designs leading up to Robie.
Wright was evolving
from a sort of tighter,
more formal gabled house
to getting-- the gable
is getting lower
and more and more
like this and finally-- ooh.
Finally, it just
becomes like this.
These became known
as Prairie Houses,
not just because they were
located on the flat lands
Midwest but because they
seemed to belong here.
It's a part of its environment.
And it graces its environment
rather than disgraces it.
These daring homes
appealed to clients
who weren't afraid
to take risks,
like Frederick and Laura Robie.
Frederick was a 28-year-old
bicycle manufacturer
who had just ventured into the
brave new world of automobile
supplies.
He was the quintessential
young rebellious guy.
He designs a car that's part
car and part motorcycle.
Wright shared Robie's
passion for the automobile.
The result, he included an
attached three-car garage
in 1910.
You're coming out of the age
of the stable and the horses.
Not for this house.
This Prairie House wasn't
built on the prairie,
but in the city, right next
to the University of Chicago.
So Robie said he was
concerned about privacy.
Robie wanted a building
where he could see out,
but people couldn't see in.
And he had a house with a lot
of glass, but just take a look.
Wright hid the inside
with art glass windows
and a projecting balcony.
Can you see in?
No.
Take a look at the--
Not really.
Today, the house is
open to the public,
if you can dins the door.
Wright recessed the entrance.
Then you come into a
dark, confined reception
area, which leads to
a narrow stairway.
But as you go up
the stairs, you turn
and ascend toward the
light, eventually emerging
into a spectacular bright space.
So what is the point of this
whole journey, this procession
that Frank Lloyd Wright
has just taken us on?
Well, it's a thing called drama.
Going through a Wright building
is playing with your senses,
it's playing with your emotions.
As you move through
the house, one room
flows seamlessly into the
next, uninterrupted by walls
or doors.
You're in one continuous space.
This revolutionary
open plan is completely
different from the typical
house of the time, which
was divided into
discreet, box-like rooms.
It's literally breaking the box.
And where old-fashioned
houses had small windows
punched into the walls
and covered with drapes,
the Robie House had continuous
bands of art glass windows.
The light surrounds you.
The exterior surrounds you.
And yet, despite all the
modern features of this house,
Frank Lloyd Wright also
gave the Robie family
a very traditional
gathering place.
And he builds fireplaces
for the rest of his career
because he's not trying to
destroy domesticity or comfort.
He sincerely wanted these
to be places for families.
But even as he was promoting
traditional family values,
Frank Lloyd Wright was
involved in an affair
with the wife of a client.
While the Robie House was
still under construction,
Wright and his mistress
left their families
and fled to Europe.
Which made huge
headlines in the paper.
The Robie House wasn't good
for Robie's marriage either.
A year after moving in, Laura
and the two kids moved out.
The house was put up for sale.
Robie, his great dream house,
he wasn't here barely a year.
But Frank Lloyd Wright would
return to the Robie House
when it was threatened
with demolition in 1957.
The 89 year old
architect had gone on
to design some of America's
most famous buildings,
but he felt compelled to defend
this earlier work, which he not
sold humbly called a cornerstone
of American architecture.
By then, it was clear just
how influential Frank Lloyd
Wright's ideas had become.
Builders had been cranking
out suburban homes that
took a page from Wright's book.
What we would call today
the ranch style house.
Low slung, horizontal,
overhanging eaves,
low pitched roofs, and windows
gathered together in strips.
Where had we seen that before?
I remember.
Frank Lloyd Wright.
When Henry Ford told the
architect Albert Kahn
that this is what he
wanted him to design,
Kahn thought he was crazy.
Kahn was not the
first one to think
that Henry Ford was crazy.
[LAUGHTER]
Kahn couldn't imagine
why anyone needed so much
uninterrupted space
under one roof.
But Ford would need it to
introduce his moving assembly
line.
Remember, Henry Ford was
a visionary and a dreamer.
And he saw things
that no one else saw.
This concrete framed
factory was light years
ahead of Ford's previous plant.
The Piquette Plant was
typical of the time
with it's thick brick
wall and narrow windows.
It was dimly lit and the space
was broken up by timber posts.
Henry Ford was using this
old-fashioned factory
to build a very modern product.
His Model T had a
user-friendly design
that allowed just about anyone
to drive and maintain it.
So he just couldn't make
them fast enough, right?
Exactly.
He had to get out of there
into larger quarters.
Albert Kahn was the
perfect architect
to design a factory
for Henry Ford.
Kahn, after all, was the guy
behind the earlier Packard
Building Number 10.
Today it's abandoned, but
when it was built in 1905,
this was one of the first
so-called daylight factories.
They had huge windows
and wide open floor plans
thanks to their reinforced
concrete frames.
Kahn made it possible for the
kind of vast open space that
is flooded with light.
This is what Henry Ford
wanted, but he and Albert Kahn
would make an unlikely pair.
Kahn was Jewish,
the son of a rabbi.
Ford famously published
The International Jew,
which suggested that Jews were
plotting to control the world.
Do you know if Kahn
ever brought it up?
Kahn never brought up the issue.
He really said by implication
it wouldn't do any good
and all it would do would
be to damage my business
relation with him.
Despite their
differences, Kahn and Ford
teamed up to change the face of
American industry just outside
of Detroit.
Highland Park's
broad walls of glass
supplied plenty of
light and fresh air
to the factory floor,
which was good for workers
and Ford's bottom line.
It improved workers' comfort.
And therefore
productivity, right?
And therefore productivity.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
The sheer enormity
of the complex
not only allowed Ford to
make most of the Model T
in one place, it
also gave the company
the space to experiment with
a new way of building cars.
Before the assembly
line, each Model T
had been put together
on wooden saw horses
by teams of assemblers who all
moved from one car to the next
and all the parts had to
be dragged to each car
by workers known as
pushers and shovers.
Who would spend a
lot of time going
to other parts of the factory
to bring parts for the one car
they were working on.
Ah.
But the vast, uninterrupted
spaces of Highland Park
made it possible to move
the car through the plant
and to a long line
of workers, each
with a single part
and a simple task
to perform over and over again.
It saved enormous amount of
wasted motions and it brought
an enormous reduction in the
cost of making Model T's.
But Henry Ford still
wasn't satisfied.
He felt that the four and six
story spaces at Highland Park
wasted time and energy
moving parts up and down.
So remarkably, just five years
after opening Highland Park,
Ford asked Albert Kahn
to design an entirely new
single-story plant.
Henry Ford was not bashful
about dropping something
he thought was outdated
and moving ahead
with something new.
Over the next 30 years,
as Henry Ford constantly
improved his production process,
he would call on Albert Kahn
to design more than
1,000 factory buildings.
And like Highland Park
and every American factory
that came after
it, these buildings
would have wide open spaces
that were filled with light.
Ford and Kahn were very
much an unlikely duo.
And yet Kahn's plan
for the Ford plant
set the pattern for American
industrial architecture
of the 20th century.
You may not know his
name, but you definitely
know his creation.
Victor Gruen designed the
first modern indoor mall.
Victor Gruen considered
this a Utopian experiment.
That's because the architect
of Southdale Center
was a Socialist, and this was
his new vision for suburbia.
He wanted to get people
out of their cars.
He was worried
that everyone would
go from their private
house, their private car,
to their private office
and back and never get
to know their neighbors,
never have any interaction.
So that was the
idea of the mall.
The vibrant community
Victor Gruen
created in this
Minnesota mall was
inspired by the bustling
street life Vienna, Austria,
where he grew up.
He had studied architecture
at the Vienna Academy
of Fine Arts, the same school
that had rejected an inspiring
artist named Adolf
Hitler 10 years earlier.
When Hitler's interests
turned more sinister,
Victor Gruen, who was
Jewish, fled to America.
It is a new concept fitting
to a particular situation.
Gruen soon made a
name for himself
in New York designing
spectacular storefronts
across the city.
But he recognized the retail
action in post-war America
was shifting to the suburbs.
And he didn't like he saw.
Victor Gruen was dismayed by
the unsightly commercial strips
sprawling for miles on end,
what he called the greatest
collection of vulgarity
ever collected by mankind.
So he thought, if
we don't intervene,
we're just going to have
large tracts of development
with no center.
Gruen got a chance to
remake suburbia in 1952 when
the Dayton Company hired him
to design an indoor shopping
mall in a Minneapolis suburb.
While a small neighborhood
mall had been enclosed before,
Southdale is where
Victor Gruen introduced
the formula for the
regional indoor shopping
mall, a formula that has Gruen's
idealistic vision written
all over it.
Look at this big,
blank wall here.
What's the purpose of that?
Well, Victor Gruen called
this the introverted type.
And what he really
wanted to do was
to take the typical suburban
shopping center, which
faced out to the
street, and flip that.
This way, Gruen could take
all that sprawling commercial
clutter he hated and hide
it in a central facility
with a plain exterior.
So that the stores faced inward
into an air conditioned space.
Inside, it was a
shopper's paradise.
72 stores under one roof.
But this wasn't just
a place to buy things.
At its center was the Garden
Court of Perpetual Spring,
which featured a goldfish
pond and an aviary, sculptures
and a sidewalk cafe.
There was even a small
zoo in the basement.
At Southdale suburbanites,
could get out of their cars
and enjoy all the
benefits of a downtown
without all the
traffic and dirt.
So he really envisioned
malls as community centers
rather than as places that
you simply go to shop.
This urban-like setting
was also good for business.
The experience was
so dazzling and fun,
customers stayed longer
and shopped more.
The windows were
placed high above
so shoppers wouldn't
be distracted
by what was going on
in the outside world.
A little bit like a casino.
They didn't want people
to actually look outside.
The Socialist architect had
created a Capitalist cash cow.
On the day Southdale opened,
75,000 curiosity seekers
came out to see what
Life Magazine dubbed
the splashiest
shopping center in US.
Though it did have at
least one detractor,
Frank Lloyd Wright
came for a tour
and said the Garden Court had
all the evils of the village
street and none of its charm.
You've tried to bring
downtown out here.
You should have left
downtown downtown.
Over time, Victor
Gruen himself grew
disillusioned with
his grand experiment.
You see, he had envisioned
the shopping center as just
one piece of a larger
planned community,
which was supposed to include
houses, apartments, offices,
and schools.
Gruen hoped this would be
a compact and well-ordered
alternative to
sprawl and blight.
Now that all didn't
come to pass.
And so, in many ways
the most important part
of Gruen's vision
hasn't been realized.
Instead, Southdale
became an isolated island
of retail in a sea of parking.
And this is what large
swaths of suburban America
came to look like.
Southdale was
imitated far and wide.
Gruen called these copycat
malls bastard developments.
They lacked his
larger social vision
and instead attracted
more of the sprawl
he tried so
desperately to fight.
And I think that that's the--
kind of the tragedy of it.
We didn't understand the depth
and breadth of his vision.
It's been so widely
imitated that today it
almost looks ordinary.
This building is not
like all those knockoffs.
In 1958, this sleek glass
skyscraper was groundbreaking.
When it went up, the
entire world noticed.
It was built by the
Seagram Corporation
as its US headquarters.
The corporate giant ended up
with an avant garde building
because it let a young art
student choose the architect.
To me it wasn't a
corporate headquarters.
It was a skyscraper in New York.
Phyllis Lambert was
just 27 when she
learned that her father, Seagram
president Samuel Bronfman,
would build his headquarters
on New York's posh Park Avenue.
I wouldn't have known anything
about corporate headquarters,
I can assure you that.
But she did know
about architecture,
and when Lambert saw
the original design
for the building,
she was appalled.
To this day, it's hard
for her to even look
at a picture of it.
Ew.
It is so upsetting
to even look at it.
My stomach sort of
goes-- I wrote my father
a long, long letter.
And the letter starts
off, no, no, no.
While the original design
would have looked right at home
in pre-war America--
No.
--Phyllis Lambert knew
we had entered a new age.
Architects were
building skyscrapers
without all the brick
and stone and decorations
that had covered steel
frame buildings since Louis
Sullivan's time.
Instead, they were
letting naked steel
and transparent glass
speak for themselves.
If you're going to
build a building,
then you do the best building
as you can at the time.
You do the best of
your civilization.
Samuel Bronfman was convinced
his daughter would choose
the right architect
for this new age.
So Lambert set out
across the country,
meeting some of the great
designers of the day.
She says that most of
them compared themselves
to the German-born
architect Mies van der Rohe.
And when she met the man
himself, she understood why.
He was so much more generous
than all the other people.
There was a kind of
presence about that man.
But what ultimately
sold her was Mies' work.
He had envisioned
glass skyscrapers
all the way back in the
early 1920s in Germany.
Mies was part of a generation of
European modernistic architects
who used the latest
technology to confront the war
and inequity that had
plagued the continent.
They came out of World
War I. And they understood
what caused World War I, this
intense insane nationalism.
And Mies van der
Rohe and his gang
wanted to create a new
international architectural
language.
This international style became
popular with corporate America
for less idealistic reasons.
It made a company look
cutting edge and efficiency,
plus it could be cheap.
It was very inexpensive
to build that way.
It's repetitive form.
But when Mies van der Rohe
met with Samuel Bronfman,
he quickly learned that
saving money was not
on the agenda for
the Seagram Building.
Mies said to my father, what
kind of materials do you like?
And my father said
he liked bronze.
So Mies covered the
entire building in bronze.
And because he used
bronze, he could
create a finesse of details.
Mies said God is in
the details, and it's
the details that set
this building apart,
some designed by
architect Philip Johnson.
The materials include pale
travertine, pink granite,
and Verd Antique marble.
This building is so
subtle and yet so complex.
At first glance, it
might seem as if you're
seeing the bare bones
of the building,
but this is actually
an illusion.
Mies placed I beams on
the outside of building,
which serve little function.
It's a decorative facade.
And the actual structure,
the steel framing,
is tucked behind it.
I see them.
They're columns behind
the glass windows.
But the most striking
and expensive feature
of this building is the huge
empty space in front of it.
This was Mies'
surprising solution
New York's strict zoning
code, which had long
prevented skyscrapers from
rising like sheer cliffs that
block out the city's
light and air.
Other architects had
responded to these rules
with setback skyscrapers,
which gradually
receded from the street.
Well, Mies van der
Rohe didn't want
to design a setback building.
Instead, he left a pricey
piece of New York real estate
open as a kind of
gift to the city.
That really shocked New York.
You know how you
shock New Yorkers?
It's not with vulgarisms.
Just be polite to them.
[LAUGHTER]
And they don't get it.
But architects and
developers clearly
did get it because
the nation soon
saw a proliferation of modernist
buildings set on broad plazas.
Everyone said, oh,
that's so nice.
The Seagram Building
has that plaza.
Everyone loves it.
Let's have plazas everywhere.
And, gee, funny thing.
None of them were as good.
And in fact, a lot of
them were really horrible.
They were awful, ugly,
concrete prison yards.
And the skyscrapers
themselves could never quite
recreate the magic of
the Seagram Building.
It looks easy to copy.
I can just do one
floor and stack them up
and every single one of them
is the same from there on.
How hard can this be?
Well, how hard is it to get
your proportions correct?
How hard it is to choose
the right materials?
How hard is it to make
the proper relationship
between a building and its site?
You're damn right that's
a tough building to make.
We are visiting
10 buildings that
changed America in
chronological order,
and we've arrived
at our eighth stop.
Today it's almost
hard to believe,
but there was a time
when getting on a plane
was a joyful experience.
And few airports captured
the magic of early jet travel
like this one.
In the 1960s, air travel was
still a very special thing.
Suddenly people
could fly nonstop
across the ocean, all
these glamorous spots.
And Eero Saarinen,
the architect,
successfully captures that sense
of excitement and anticipation.
Dulles has all the
sculptural stylishness
Eero Saarinen was known for.
In an era often remembered for
its understated glass boxes,
Saarinen offered a more
expressive brand of modernism.
He understood the
kind of spectacle
that architecture could
be and the theatricality
that was suppressed in
the more rational avant
garde modern architecture.
Saarinen was
finishing his design
for a new TWA Terminal in
New York when he got the call
to design Dulles
outside Washington, DC.
But this wasn't
just any airport.
Dulles would be
the first airport
in the world built
expressly for jets.
Saarinen said, this is a
different kind of transit.
We are transporting ourselves
in a new machine and a new era
and we have to represent that.
Saarinen decided to take a
highly scientific approach.
He started by sending
teams of researchers
out to American airports,
armed with stopwatches.
How fast do people move
from point A to point B?
What are their patterns of
transit within a building?
Why are they going from A to B?
Saarinen found that
people had to do
a lot of walking to
get to their planes.
That's because these
airports had originally
been designed to serve smaller
propeller-driven planes,
and now they were adapting to
the oversized needs of jets
by cobbling together an endless
expanse of terminal fingers,
lounges, and new
telescoping gang planks.
Saarinen was really
eager to try to avoid
those fingers, those
tentacles, coming out
of airport terminals
that were already
starting to create such a mess.
So at Dulles, Saarinen designed
a single narrow terminal
where passengers only
had to walk 150 feet.
Then, a contraption called
mobile lounge would whisk them
away to their plane.
So 150 feet, and then
you were ready to relax
and get ready to travel.
A half century later,
some of the mobile lounges
are still in use.
These were designed to
work like actual lounges.
You could relax in here
with a cigarette and a drink
while the lounge took
you to your plane.
Saarinen wanted this to look
like a 20th century gateway
to the nation's capital, so
he combined the curviness
of the jet age with the
classicism of Washington, DC.
I think it's easy to see this
front part of the building
as an abstraction of
a classical temple.
With the columns.
With the columns, the colonnade.
Sort of in keeping with
the official architecture
of Washington, DC.
The columns hold up the
swooping concrete roof
in a way the ancient Greeks
never could have imagined.
Instead of resting
on top of them,
the roof hangs from them
like a giant hammock.
The solid concrete appears
to float above the undulating
glass walls.
It doesn't look like anything
you've ever seen before.
You don't know what
makes it stand up.
It's a big concrete
building that
looks as light as a
handkerchief in the wind.
It looks like it's going to
just blow away at any minute.
It won't hurt you
when that happens.
It'll just kind of float off
and land in some other airport
somewhere else.
Eero Saarinen never got to
see the completed airport.
He died suddenly
from a brain tumor
when Dulles was still
under construction.
But the weightless
form he created
here left a permanent mark
on the world's architecture.
Some airport architects seem
to have overtly copied Dulles'
swooping shapes.
Others have simply been inspired
by Saarinen's broader vision
for what an airport should be--
a well ordered and welcoming
gateway to a city.
Especially nowadays, when
travel can be so stressful,
to have a sense that
everything is going to work.
That you're going to know
where you're supposed to go.
That it will be a
pleasant experience
to move through the building.
All of those things are very
much the architect's job.
It's been called the
first postmodern building.
Its architect thumbed his nose
at modernism's strict rules.
Why?
What was wrong with them?
What--
I don't know.
Just that I'm kind of a pervert.
[LAUGHTER]
Modernist buildings had
entire walls of windows.
But you never have a
wall with a window in it.
Modernists frowned upon
frivolous decoration.
And this house has the kind
of wood elements on it.
And he heard modern
architect Marcel Breuer
say you should never
paint a house green.
And so I immediately
said, I'm going home
and painting that house green.
Robert Venturi sparked a big
debate with this little house
on the edge of
Philadelphia, which
he designed for
his elderly mother.
Like her son, Vanna
Venturi wasn't
afraid to go against the grain.
She was this combination
of Socialist and pacifist.
And she refused to send
you to public school.
That's right.
Because she was afraid I'd
have to pledge allegiance
to the flag.
In other words, she
was an ideal client
for a house that would challenge
the modernist establishment.
She just sort of
left it up to me.
Robert Venturi's
problem with modernists
was that they tried to
meet the complicated needs
of our society with grand
schemes and rigid rules.
The result, he felt, was
bland architecture that people
had trouble connecting with.
Mies van der Rohe famously
declared, less is more.
Venturi shot back,
less is a bore.
He said, why should we
be reducing architecture
to this pure simple
minimalist object?
But Robert Venturi's
manifesto against modernism
didn't come easily.
For four years, he designed
and redesigned the house.
He started designing
it when we met.
I met him in 1960.
His future wife and
collaborator found
he was always disappearing
to work on his mom's house.
Then every now and
then I wouldn't see him
for about a month.
And I thought, look.
This is a very
interesting person.
In particular, he labored over
the unusually tall chimney,
which he says was an
obscene gesture directed
at the establishment.
The chimney was
a bit doing this.
The completed house
looks vaguely familiar,
even if you've never
seen it before.
That's because Venturi
borrowed familiar elements that
have been used by home
builders throughout history.
Instead of an abstract
modernist box this house--
Looks like a child's drawing.
I think that's a
nice thing to say.
An appropriate thing to say.
Because I wanted it to be
a kind of fundamental--
Generic.
Symbolic, generic house.
But as you get
closer, you discover
that what looks like a
huge chimney from afar
can't possibly be real
because it has windows.
Through them, you see
stairs, not smoke.
And what appears
to be a gable roof
has the real roof
hiding behind it,
along with the real chimney.
So what you're saying is this
is really a facade, right?
Yeah.
It's like--
It's very much as facade.
Like a billboard.
It's like a billboard.
It's like a billboard,
that's right.
Walking in the door, you
discover the real house
behind the billboard.
Can you explain to me
what's going on here?
Why--
In the living room,
an oversized fireplace
jockeys for position
with a stairway.
The stairs, at first,
widen, but then
they narrow to squeeze
around the real chimney.
It's an illogical step.
You said it's illogical?
It's an illogical step because
it gets wider as you go up.
Really, this clashing of
things is the emotional center
of this building.
And then there's this stairway
that leads to nowhere.
The idea here is
that while modernists
fought so hard to
create order, this house
recognizes awkwardness
and confusion.
It embraces complexity
and contradiction.
That, by the way, was the title
of Venturi's influential book.
So Venturi might
say, it's important
for there to be
that contradiction,
that the building should always
come around and surprise.
And that the idea that an
architect has the capacity
to come up with a perfect
ideal form is a flawed idea.
And the architecture
world took notice.
Not long after Vanna
Venturi moved in,
visitors started showing up on
her doorstep by the busload.
I think she enjoyed it.
She could sit and give a
seminar man at this table.
And telling stories
about her son
when he was a little boy
and all that nonsense.
Soon, Mrs. Venturi's
little house
became a source of inspiration
for thousands of architects.
Postmodernism, as
it became known,
started showing up
everywhere from skyscrapers
to strip malls.
Many real estate
developers simply
saw it as a cheap and easy
way to brand their buildings
by slapping
historical references
on a billboard-like facade.
And so just as the
world is plastered
with examples of bad modern
architecture, well, guess what?
There are thousands of examples
of postmodern architecture
that's just as bad.
God awful wedding cake
imitation of history
made to look quasi historical.
Or worse, abstracted
into some kind
of cartoon version of history.
I wasn't trying
to be postmodern.
Starting a movement was never
on Robert Venturi's agenda.
Don't trust an architect who's
trying to start a movement.
[LAUGHTER]
When Walt Disney's
widow announced
that she would help pay
for a new classical music
hall for Los Angeles,
many expected
a conservative building.
The architect says the Disney
family's own lawyer requested
traditional touches
like brass handrails.
So I put more breath
handrails in--
[LAUGHTER]
--than was necessary
for that guy.
And I brought him
over here and I
said, is that enough
brass handrails for you?
Today, Frank Gehry is arguably
America's most acclaimed living
architect, known for building
splashy cultural institutions
around the world.
But back in 1988, he was a
long shot in the competition
to design this concert
hall in his own hometown.
It was the least
likeliest thing that I
thought would ever
happen to me in my life.
You see, at the time Gehry was
known for his funky low budget
buildings made with
the kinds of materials
you'd never find in a classical
music hall, like plywood,
raw sheet metal, and
chain link fence.
Nobody had ever trusted him
with a large public building
or a large budget before.
So when Gehry entered
the competition
to design the Walt
Disney Concert Hall,
he says that Disney family
lawyer had a word with him.
He informed me that
under no circumstances
would Walt Disney's name be on
any building that I designed.
Undeterred, he
entered with a design
that was inspired by the
populist spirit of Walt Disney
himself.
While a classical music
venue could end up
feeling stuffy
and elitist, Gehry
wanted this one to be
inviting and accessible.
I always thought Walt
Disney stood for creativity.
I never thought that I was going
to make Mickey Mouse and things
all over the place.
[LAUGHTER]
It was that design that
caught Mrs. Disney's eye.
Frank Gehry got the job.
I couldn't believe it.
But because of a long string
of financial and political
problems, it would
be another 15 years
before he could
finish the building.
Gehry used the time to
take his winning entry
and extensively redesign
it from the inside out.
My notion was that
there's a box.
Working with an
acoustical consultant,
Gehry found that
a box shaped hall
would produce the best sound.
Like that.
But within the confines
of that container,
he wanted to figure out how to
create an intimate relationship
between the audience
and the orchestra.
Instead of seeing the
back of people's heads,
you're looking at faces.
The faces of the audience,
the faces of the orchestra.
That's what he wanted.
But the acoustician says,
it's got to be a box.
So he's wriggling
within the box.
Gehry's solution was to build
this sculptural saddle-shaped
seating in which the
audience completely
envelops the orchestra.
That feeling does change
the way the orchestra plays.
Because they feel it.
They feel this.
They feel the intimacy.
And when they play better,
these guys respond better
and these guys play better.
Go it's a-- that.
The billowing shapes are
echoed on the outside
in stainless steel.
They're inspired by
Gehry's love of sailing.
These sails form a
rampant around building,
which masks it's more
mundane inner workings.
Well, the building's a box.
Yeah.
And I put their toilets
and elevators on each side.
But the outside of the building,
you don't necessarily see that.
Well, look at-- see that
wall-- those two walls.
Uh huh.
They're against the box.
And all I did was
tweak the corner.
And so once I did that, then the
next level down I did the same.
In other places,
the architect says
the shapes relate to the
building's neighbors,
including the old music
hall across the street.
That happened by accident.
This building's
highly complex forms
couldn't have been made in
the era before computers.
Frank Gehry's office has
transformed the architecture
business with its use of
software that was originally
created to design fighter jets.
There's a whole lot of
technology running around
in what seems like
whimsical shape-making.
Frank Gehry's unique
forms are rarely
imitated by other architects,
but his pioneering technology
and daring spirit
have offered us
a new model for how to create
successful public buildings
using adventuresome
architecture.
I think Frank Gehry has
changed architecture.
Disney Hall liberates
the spirits of everybody
who walks by it.
And I think, in
the same way, this
has liberated
architects to be bold.
Frank Gehry is part of a
bold American tradition.
In this young country,
some architects
have felt free to cast aside the
entrenched artistic traditions
of the Old World.
In America, architects have
been able to brazenly redefine
what buildings should look
like, whether by reaching
into the past to breathe
new life into old forms,
by using the latest technology
to change the way we live,
or by inventing forms
we've never seen before.
They've shown that American
architecture isn't so much
a single style as it is an
endless process of reinvention.
There isn't a thing
you point at and say,
ah, that's American
architecture.
We beg, borrow, and steal.
We reshape.
And we create
interesting architecture,
whether that's the wholly
original person of a Frank
Lloyd Wright, the importation
of a Mies van der Rohe,
or the complete
futurism of a new firm,
we really relish, as
a nation, that sort
of architectural ferment.
We really do.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
