Would you like to know how a critic feels? As If he were building up a world of buildings. The architect uses plans and elevations. The critic uses architects. A new architect comes into his hands as into the architect’s own office comes a sample of a marvelous new material: perhaps it is just a new tar that will more cheaply guarantee his roof against a leak, perhaps a new truss that will greatly change construction, or perhaps a new reflector that will help flood a whole room with mysteriously invigorating light. And so for the critic every architect serves his turn, according to his own worth whether as nail or ridgepole, to enlarge or illuminate the critic’s growing City.
—Douglas Haskell, 1930
When the closure of the State Department’s New York publications office ended Jacobs’s eight years of work for the government, she was in need of a new way to help support her family. She was also ready for a new chapter in her career as a writer.
After Amerika, Jacobs followed her interests in geography and the life sciences and briefly pursued a position with Natural History magazine, whose editors she had approached in 1945, the last time she was out of work, with the idea of a story on Siberia. But her interests in cities, and better pay, led her to the offices of Architectural Forum, a Time, Incorporated, magazine located in Rockefeller Center. She had become a regular reader because of Bob Jacobs’s subscription and liked it. Moreover, she may already have become acquainted with Forum s staff during her work as an editor at Amerika Illustrated: Her work for Amerika included articles on American architecture, school design, housing, urban redevelopment, and American cities and neighborhoods that were illustrated by photographs borrowed from magazines including Progressive Architecture and Architectural Forum.
Whether because of her prior experience and writing on architecture, or prior acquaintance, Douglas Haskell, the editor of Architectural Forum, didn’t hesitate in offering Jacobs a trial assignment and quickly bringing her into his close-knit circle of associate editors. She may have hesitated when he told her Forum needed a new hospitals and schools department editor and handed her the rolls of drawings of the first building she was to review, but with some help from Bob Jacobs, within a few months, Haskell was relying on her advice and opinions. Although he was more than twenty years her senior, Haskell had compatible sensibilities and other things in common that contributed to a close working relationship. He had followed a similar career path; he had dedicated himself to a writing career and had no academic training in architecture. Equally significant, they shared a sense of the enduring importance of cities at a time when suburbanization was a powerful cultural force.
At Architectural Forum, Jacobs learned to be an architectural and urban design critic. Although she had risen to the level of senior writer and editor at Amerika, writing propaganda for the State Department and a Soviet audience had required a subtle approach in which she treated controversial subjects with restraint and was careful to lure and convince rather than antagonize. By contrast, at the moment when Jacobs arrived at Forum, Haskell was at a turning point in his lifelong mission to reinvigorate American architectural criticism. Liberated from some of the constraints that had previously thwarted him, he wanted Forum to emulate other emergent forms of cultural criticism and the more aggressive approach of the British Architectural Review. He was ready to see his magazine publish the kind of architectural criticism that came dangerously close to the threat of libel lawsuits and he recognized in Jacobs someone who could help him do so.
Ultimately, Jacobs would take architectural criticism in directions unanticipated by Haskell, beyond his expectations and comfort. However, her new vision of cities, and her contributions to the new field of urban design, emerged from her work at Forum, where she contributed to most of the issues published over a six-and-a-half-year period, quickly becoming, with Haskell’s support, its expert on urban redevelopment and, according to him, its best writer on the subject. These years, which were dominated by debates about the crises and next steps for modern architecture and cities, were the critical backdrop of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Indeed, understanding the contexts, sources, and evolution of Jacobs’s ideas makes it difficult to imagine the book coming into being without the knowledge, experience, network, and support that Jacobs gained at Forum. From her first article for the magazine, in which she analyzed the functions of a hospital in Peru, to Death and Life, which was initially conceived as a study of the relationship between function and design in cities, architectural debates informed her thinking. Building on Forum s editorial agenda for architectural and urban criticism, Jacobs turned critiques about architectural functionalism into a new conception of the functional city.
Jacobs arrived at the Forum offices in May 1952 with characteristically good timing. Some months earlier, in January 1952, Architectural Forum, The Magazine of Building had split into two magazines: House & Home, a new magazine devoted to the “brand new postwar industry” of home building, and Architectural Forum, which would focus on schools, hospitals, shopping centers, office buildings, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects. Since acquiring the magazine in 1932, Henry R. Luce, the cofounder of Time, Inc., and Forum’s editor-in-chief, had worked to make Forum the leading chronicler of the anticipated postwar construction boom, and he hired Haskell in 1949 as the magazine’s new architectural editor. By January 1952, when House & Home was published under its own cover, Haskell was editorial chairman of two magazines and his personnel was spread thin. He needed more staff. In particular, he needed a new hospitals and schools editor, and so he offered Jacobs a trial assignment to review a new hospital designed by Edward Durell Stone.1
Despite needing some coaching on reading architectural drawings from Bob Jacobs, who, conveniently, was a hospital architect, Jacobs was well qualified for the position. She had almost ten years of experience at the associate editor level, in addition to years of freelance work, and she had served for a number of years as an editor of a magazine with a strategic and sensitive editorial agenda. Including her early freelance articles on Manhattan’s working districts, she had already written close to a dozen articles on architecture and cities. In writing a lengthy two-part series “New Horizons in Architecture” for Amerika, she had described the development of modern American architectural thinking and practice. In two other long articles, she wrote on modern housing and urban redevelopment. In fact, the articles “Planned Reconstruction of Lagging City Districts” and “Slum Clearance,” published in Amerika in 1949 and 1950, were apparently among the earliest extended treatments on the new U.S. Housing Act of 1949 published in any magazine. If Jacobs had not been paying attention to the redevelopment projects around the city in the 1930s and early 1940s, these articles had caught her up with pre-Housing Act developments even before she started at Forum. Perhaps of greater interest to Haskell at the time, however, Jacobs had also written an article about modern schools and had edited an article on modern hospitals for Amerika.2
“Two-in-One Hospital,” an eight-page feature on a state hospital in Lima, Peru, designed by Stone and the U.S. Public Health Service, was published in June 1952. In her first assignment as an architectural critic, Jacobs showed herself to be characteristically observant and analytical and to be sympathetic to the aims of modern architecture, while notably valuing the building’s life-enhancing features, its functional qualities, and its innovations over its formal and aesthetic subtleties. She described the Peru hospital as noteworthy for 1) “its simple organization of tremendously complex functions; 2) its open, patio-dotted ground floor, certainly one of the world’s pleasantest and easiest to navigate for patients and staff; 3) its careful regard for the customs of those who will use it; 4) its complete and decisive division of some facilities and its equally complete and convenient integration of others; and 5) its thoroughgoing traffic rationale, consistent in detail and in the whole. 3
In her first critique of a building, Jacobs thus demonstrated an interest in the functionalism of modern architecture in a truly comprehensive sense. The essence of the design problem for this “double hospital” was, as Jacobs summarized it, “how to make the maternity hospital and the general hospital completely distinct and yet completely integrated. In doing so, she appreciated the way that the building’s thoughtful design enabled its basic purposes, while at the same time separating the healthy and the ill. Recognizing architecture’s subtle but inevitable influence on daily life and experience, she commended the design for providing comprehensibility of organization and movement, as well as a pleasant experience for staff and visitors. However, going beyond strict functionalism, she also admired the way that the design preserved and facilitated local custom. In Peru, she noted approvingly, “child-birth is regarded as an exciting, wholesome event which has nothing to do with illness. As a subtle critique of the American approach to childbirth, which she knew from personal experience, her review offered the design in Peru as a good model for hospitals, practices, and attitudes at home.4
FIGURE 17. The cover image of Jacob’s article on slum clearance in Amerika no. 45 (1950) shows the construction of Alfred E. Smith Houses, located in New York’s Lower East Side, which began in 1950. The caption translates as “Planned reconstruction of lagging city neighborhoods.” Columbia University Libraries.
The article became Jacobs’s first feature as the magazine’s new hospitals and schools editor. Haskell was duly impressed by Jacobs’s trial assignment, which recommended her as someone with a progressive, unconventional, and critical mindset. For Haskell, moreover, someone without professional training in architecture—and therefore less likely to be personally invested in an architectural style, school, or the work of a Meister—was an asset.
Although Jacobs may have suffered later in her career for not having the right academic degrees, this made Jacobs and Haskell good working partners. Both had started out as freelance writers, and Haskell, as a new permanent staff member at Architectural Record in the mid-1940s, had covered the schools department. He had become a respected authority on prefabricated housing in the 1940s, and he would have believed Jacobs capable of developing similar specialties. Both had deep commitments to the social consequences and possibilities of cities and buildings, and they were largely free of doctrinaire beliefs and allegiances in achieving these. Both were pluralists who believed in a diversity of viewpoints, and they were genuine modernists in the sense that they instinctively questioned dogmatic ideas and practices no matter how modern they claimed to be. Just a few months before he hired Jacobs, Haskell had written a memo for the executive staff at House & Home titled “Why We Publish Modern,” in which he declared that “the trouble with ‘traditionalism is that it cuts off at the source those mental habits which lead to deeper thinking and better solutions. His words could have been hers: Jacobs’s deep-seated interest in “how things work” manifested itself as an expectation that modern architecture meant something more than aesthetics.5
Both Jacobs and Haskell, moreover, had an anti-utopian streak: a desire to solve problems now and with the tools at hand, rather than wait for a wholesale transformation of the context in which better conditions and solutions would prevail. This trait had brought Haskell into conflict with his longtime friend and sometime adversary Lewis Mumford, whose proposals were typically building “from the ground up.” The same would later happen with Jacobs. In their individual ways, both Haskell’s and Jacobs’s views were expressed in an interest in a building’s participation in larger contexts: with its users, with the city, and with the “world that they contributed to building through their writing.
Haskell, finally, was no chauvinist: His coeditor at The New Student, a weekly that he directed following his graduation from Oberlin College in 1923, had been a woman, and he considered his spouse, Helen Haskell, his equal. During his years of freelance work, Helen had been the steady breadwinner, and since then, the Haskells took equal responsibility in the ownership and management of Camp Treetops in upstate New York, a nondenominational summer camp that emphasized diversity and progressive education.6
With this common ground quickly established, Jacobs was introduced to Haskell’s small team of associate editors early in the summer of 1952. As Peter Blake wrote in his memoir, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept, they were a “small kernel of people who believed in the magazine’s ‘mission and in a degree of editorial sophistication and quality.” The editors included Walter McQuade, a bright, witty, and rather sardonic writer who had been trained as an architect at Cornell, and Louise Cooper, an economist who supplied the magazine with relevant expertise. Blake, who knew the staff even before Haskell’s tenure, rounded out the team. In the 1930s, Blake had worked as a freelance draftsman for the longtime Forum art director Paul Grotz, and, before the war, he had worked as a writer for the managing editor George Nelson in 1942. In August 1950, Blake rejoined Forum on Haskell’s staff as an associate editor, fresh from a stint as the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).7
With this team in place, on July 23, 1952, Haskell released a six-page staff memo outlining the magazine’s new editorial agenda. After years of effort and the distractions of reorganizing the magazine, Haskell had won the support of Henry Luce and Time, Inc. s executive editors for a new approach to architectural journalism. This new approach would manifest itself in all of the magazine’s departments, even within its features on particular building types, then the traditional focus of architectural magazines. In response to new postwar building trends, which Haskell described as a “more advanced stage of the Industrial Revolution, these studies had assumed new importance. In fact, such developments had prompted the reorganization of the magazine and the spin-off of House & Home, which focused exclusively on housing and the home-building industry. Forum, meanwhile, would take a progressive approach to the other major building types. In Haskell’s new editorial agenda, this meant “not just industrial plants is our subject, but why new defense plants must be different. Not just hospitals, but what makes the 1940 hospital obsolete. Not just schools, but Forum’s proposed school for the 1950s.”8
In all aspects of the magazine, a new focus was required. Forum, he declared, would “inaugurate architectural criticism.” After years of seeking to break down the barriers set up by professional gentlemen’s agreements, editorial complacency, and publishers fears of libel lawsuits, Haskell had Luce’s blessing to restore “the lost right of architectural criticism.
Since the 1930s, Haskell explained, American architectural criticism had been stifled by the threat of libel suits. He wrote, “Ever since about 1929, architectural criticism in the United States has been in effect illegal, partly because of court decisions then rendered and partly because of the cowardice then of editors of certain national magazines who set the precedent of settling cases out of court. Never since has an architectural magazine stepped out of narrow bounds of architectural criticism. It was tacitly assumed that nothing could be done.”9
But now, Haskell told his staff, Luce and Time, Inc. s lawyers had agreed to support a more outspoken approach: “My news to you is that The Magazine of Building in both editions [Forum and House & Home] has quietly restored genuine architectural criticism—not the wrist slapping kind, but the kind where you first consult your lawyers about possible action. … Our encouragement for doing this came from the first-class lawyers who serve Time Inc. who told us that in case of attack, they would be delighted to defend us for the purpose of restoring to the United States the lost right of architectural criticism.”10
Finally, as part of the magazine’s new direction, Forum would intensify its effort to address the “problems of cities. Haskell boasted that Forum was already the most up-to-date American architectural journal where urban redevelopment was concerned. “We have traced the impact of redevelopment on Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia (twice), Norfolk, and now Washington,” he reminded his staff, referring to articles published between May 1950 and April 1952. “While we have been doing all these stories,” he continued, “the strictly architectural magazines have published not one. They have been fast asleep and snoring.”11
This agenda, inaugurated just as Jacobs joined Haskell’s team, would become the foundation both for her work for the magazine and for Death and Life.
Jacobs was too smart and independently accomplished to admit to having a mentor (perhaps other than Bob Jacobs), but she was influenced by many people. While Forum provided her with an alternative to the academy, a place of collegiality, research, study, feedback, and institutional support, Haskell, later dubbed “the dean of architectural editors” for contributions to American architectural criticism and journalism that spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s, was one of her most important teachers.12
Although his career is little known, Haskell was one of the most influential figures in American architectural journalism. As the historian Robert Alan Benson has pointed out, he was among the first critics of modern architecture in America and, after Lewis Mumford, among the most accomplished.13
Like Jacobs and Mumford, Haskell began to write as early as high school, thinking he could earn a livelihood while making a positive difference in the world. He was born in the Balkans to a family of missionaries in 1899, and the influence of his uncle Henry J. Haskell, whose career in journalism won him two Pulitzer Prizes, suggested to the teenager an alternative to missionary work. Following six years in a German boarding school at Wilhelmsdorf—the idea of his Swiss-German stepmother—he returned to the family home in Oberlin, Ohio, to attend high school, and he soon became involved in small publishing endeavors. At Oberlin College, which Haskell entered in 1916 (the year Jacobs was born), at seventeen, he continued printing as a small business, providing some needed income.14
Although Haskell left college in 1923 without a strong conviction about his future path, his fluent German led to the opportunity to help organize a student exchange tour to Germany, funded by the philanthropic Pratt family of New York, during the summer after graduation. A visit to the four-year-old Weimar Bauhaus, where he met Walter Gropius, fused his interests in art and social reform in a life-changing revelation. His immediate reaction was to return to school to study architecture, but upon reflection, Haskell, then a newlywed, could not see returning to school, and he instead took an opportunity to coedit a Pratt-endowed, progressive weekly called The New Student, in which he promoted the optimistic, Nietzsche-influenced spirit of early Weimar Germany. As Jacobs would do about a decade later, Haskell moved to New York and started his writing career.15
The New Student gave Haskell few occasions to write about the new modern architecture, but the April 1925 issue, which used campus architecture as the thematic jumping-off point, was a notable exception. As a survey of recent writing and examples of modern architecture—including the work of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Claude Bragdon, Lewis Mumford, and a number of Dutch writers and architects—Haskell’s essay “Shells” was among the earliest comprehensive assessments of the modern movement. The most prominent American architectural magazine, Architectural Record, did not publish a comparable analysis of European modernism until the following year. For its prescience, Haskell’s article received not only praise from Bragdon and Mumford, but also attention from Time and Herbert Croley, the founder of The New Republic and a former editor of Architectural Record.16
“Shells,” Haskell’s first work of architectural criticism, critiqued recent historicist campus architecture with a rhetorical style similar to that later employed by Jacobs. He proposed that university architecture based on period styles was representative of a school’s “enslavement to shadows, to predetermined notions, petrifications, parchment, self-adulation, pretense, and the higher bunk.” If MIT’s architecture, for example, was neoclassical, what then, he asked, “can we believe about their reverence for their science, their technology? What do they know about doing? And what of education?” The idea that the new modern architecture, by contrast, could reveal the “imagination, independence, and the virility” of a university’s—or a society’s—reactions to the “real world” reflected the influence of not only Gropius but also the progressive education theorist John Dewey. Dewey was a contributor to The New Student and admired by Haskell and his wife, Helen; one of Dewey’s students had founded the Connecticut school where Helen was a teacher. Although Jacobs did not acknowledge any special debt to Dewey herself, she often similarly stressed the significance of “doing,” experience, and “how things worked in the real world.”17
In the following five years, Haskell left The New Student to take up freelance writing on architecture and museum exhibits, and he made a series of quick advances in architectural journalism, moving from a position as an editor for Creative Art to a temporary position as associate editor at Architectural Record. First turned down for a permanent position at Record on account of his lack of technical architectural knowledge, he was asked to substitute for the man hired, who had just won a traveling fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to visit Rome and study the antiquities. Haskell’s humbling experience seems to have ensured that neither pedigree nor lack of technical knowledge would become an obstacle for Jacobs’s work as an architectural critic.
Soon thereafter, Haskell landed a long-running and prestigious position as the architectural critic of The Nation, and, having followed the development of modern architecture since the early 1920s, he was well prepared to write about it at the moment it was legitimized by art historians and museum curators in the early 1930s. Following a five-month trip to Europe, from October 1931 to February 1932, to study firsthand the new modern architecture in Holland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, Haskell wrote reviews of the three exhibitions that introduced modern architecture to America. These exhibits—the Architectural League of New York’s Exposition of Architecture and Allied Art; the Rejected Architects show of 1931, organized by Philip Johnson; and the definitive Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, organized by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock for MOMA in 1932—continued to resonate for decades to come.
Because Haskell was open-minded in ways that came easier to someone not trained as an architect, his reviews for The Nation typically mixed criticism and approval in reflection of the belief that modern architecture should be an open-ended and nondogmatic engagement with life. After living in Ernst May’s Siedlung Römerstadt (1928) in Frankfurt for a number of weeks with his wife, and studying how the project came into being, interviewing some fifty residents, and observing how the buildings had weathered, Haskell sincerely believed that modern architecture could improve the lives of those historically neglected by architects and that it was more than a style. He was therefore quick to criticize young modernists for having already become devotees of what Henry-Russell Hitchcock described in Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929) as the “international style.”18
In Haskell’s view, the “rejected architects” had “not yet begun to fight.” Anticipating criticisms that Jacobs and others would make later, he observed that “their imaginations are held captive by Le Corbusier; they are inhibited; and so, although the science and technology to which they profess devotion hold in them a greater diversity of means and a larger range of types than we have ever had before, most of these men clung tenaciously to the flat box type hung on interior posts just as the older men clung to column and to gable.” Moreover, Haskell criticized the exhibition’s focus on the single-family home (a criticism still relevant): “Although for city purposes our best knowledge discards the freestanding house, their town planning exhibit retained it.”19
Thus, while suggesting that privileging the detached, single-family house—a housing type associated not only with the suburbs, but also with a privileged clientele—represented a failure to embrace the need for multifamily housing and the possibilities of modern architecture, Haskell described these young modern architects as not being modern enough. Later, in Death and Life, Jacobs would similarly chide architects of the late 1950s for clinging “to old intellectual excitements … on the grounds that they must be ‘modern’ in their thinking.”20
At its heart, their shared argument—although Haskell arrived at his conclusions years before—was that the superficial acceptance of a stylistic architectural language undermined the potential inherent in functionalism, whose virtues transcended style. In “What the Man About Town Will Build,” a review of the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Haskell similarly predicted the popularization of modern architecture and warned of the consequences of its becoming a style. Published soon after his return from Europe in April 1932, Haskell wrote, “A house that is a sort of box or aggregation of boxes—flat top, flat sides with plenty of glass in them, color generally white, and the whole thing preferably raised on stilts—this, loosely described, is what you were given to see at the Museum of Modern Art. … And, considering events, we can be quite sure that houses more or less like these are what the man about town will build.”21
In his 1932 essay “Is It Functional?” Haskell went on to question fake functionalism, and what Jacobs would frequently criticize as “wishful thinking.” Illustrating his text and argument with before and after photographs of Peter Behrens’s apartment at the Weissenhofsiedlung, Haskell showed that supposedly “functional” modern buildings, which claimed a machinelike reciprocity between form and function, had actually weathered far worse than more traditional buildings. The captions of the photos of Behrens’s apartment, which in just five years had deteriorated terribly, read “Too ‘functionalist’ even to be functional. Stucco trying to imitate the smoothness of the machine looked handsome at first” but “in five years Nature took revenge. Mechanical looking ‘functionalism’ was not so functional after all.” He wrote that “common rain water was functionally destined within five years to wreak unusual havoc upon the smooth stucco surface. It would leave ugly stains under the windows and run a broad crack down from the roof, doing damage against which the pre-functional house with its wider sheltering projections was better protected, and under which the new one, again just because it looked so very smooth and so very fresh when new, would become more hopelessly disreputable and bedraggled when just a little older.”22
The points of Haskell’s essay were at least threefold. First, although “functionalism” should indicate nothing but “exact technique,” he argued that exact technique was impossible in architecture. In reality, functionalist architecture was metaphoric, an “architect’s fairy tale” caught between an “inevitable collision between the functioning of brutal fact and function.” Second, accepting this reality opened functional architecture to a greater range of inspirations. The machine was neither the only nor the best functional metaphor; Frank Lloyd Wright’s organicism, or organic functionalism, was one well-known alternative. Haskell concluded, “I do not think that the twentieth century is ready to limit its resources. Is not mankind limited enough from the beginning in that its creation always goes largely by metaphor and simile? Can we stretch a single one of these to shelter our whole life? A ‘machine’ in which to carry on a conversation; a machine in which to make love. A subtle machine, the last. Other symbols can be found that carry a share of truth: for instance, there is that of the tree.”23 Third, regardless of the metaphor, whether machine or tree, the success of the architectural creation depended on the architect’s imagination. “Each architect a poet according to the depth of his imagination. … All we can ask is that his fairy-tale come true,” he wrote.24
Among his published work, the line “Each architect a poet according to the depth of his imagination” perhaps best reflected Haskell’s characteristic willingness to look for the best that each architect had to offer. But Haskell’s genius as an architectural critic was even more apparent in two unpublished essays from the early 1930s, which articulated part of the editorial agenda that shaped Jacobs’s time at Forum.
In “Three Architects,” Haskell recognized that modern architecture, at its best, was a pluralistic endeavor. As suggested by the title, he identified three different modern architectural attitudes, based on the figures of Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, and Le Corbusier, and argued that each of their approaches was not only equally modern and valid, but also equally necessary for a full exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture. In another essay, “On Architectural Criticism,” Haskell used the image and metaphor of a city to illustrate the importance of diversity in the modern movement. Although it is unlikely that Jacobs ever read these essays, Haskell’s notion that the architectural critic played a “city-building” role in “a world of buildings” made him an empowering and ennobling mentor for his editorial staff. “Would you like to know how a ‘critic’ of architecture feels?,” he asked rhetorically, going on to describe how a critic can shape a world using the work of many architects, just as the architect can use plans to shape a building. “For the critic every architect serves his turn, according to his own worth whether as nail or ridgepole, to enlarge or illuminate the critic’s growing City,” he wrote.25
Haskell’s “world of buildings” was not quite a fully formed parable, but the moral was clear, and Jacobs would have loved the metaphor. As diverse buildings made up the city, the diversity of architectural ideas made up the modern movement. And, just as many hands formed the city from various architectural ideas, no single architect had a monopoly on the truth. The corollary of this was another belief that Haskell and Jacobs would share: the impossibility of a city designed by a single mastermind.
Many years later, in a letter to his friend William Wurster, Haskell returned to the “world” metaphor to explain that his approach to criticism was different than that of “propagandists and prophets.” Among these, he wrote, “You can count on [Sigfried] Giedion to say that Le Corbusier and he alone should have had the UN to do; and you could have fairly counted on Lewis Mumford to say that Le Corbusier is wickedly ‘mechanistic’ in all his ways.” By comparison, Haskell affirmed, he and Forum would try “to do what the great Victorian critics of literature used to try, which was to give the artist—each artist—credit for trying to produce a world, his world, that particular artist’s world.”26
As compared to Jacobs, Haskell may have had a greater willingness to give each artist credit for creating unique worlds—she did not believe that cities were canvases for artists. However, they shared, or came to share, a belief that architecture must be imagined in the “real world.” The architect could not be only a philosopher, theorist, engineer, sociologist, or aesthetician. Because architecture needed the trials of weather and marketplace and politicians and users, the architectural critic must think beyond the parts and personalities. Concluding his essay on architectural criticism, Haskell thus wrote,
Where philosophy gains by purity and detachment, architecture
gains by impurity and mingling with the marketplace. It is all
action. ’Till the stone and concrete of the foundation rest in the
actual mud, nothing has really happened. The thought is translated
back into physical reality. Everywhere exposed. To merciless
Nature and her weather. To the landshark. To the money shark.
To politician, walking delegate, contractor, assessor, building
inspector, and to the client’s use or misuse. What an epic process!
That is why small critics are always trying to divide architecture
into one of its parts. Their appetite fails. Architecture becomes
sociology only, or aesthetics, or construction.27
This appetite for the “epic process” in which the real world weathered and misused architecture and shaped cities was perhaps the strongest desire shared between Haskell and Jacobs. They ultimately favored life, an epic process through which the common ground of architecture and cities was constructed, over buildings.
If Death and Life can be seen as being part of modern architecture’s phase change into postmodernism, it is significant that by 1952, when Haskell hired Jacobs, both modern architecture and modern urbanism were already in crisis. As the editor James Maude (J. M.) Richards, Haskell’s counterpart at The Architectural Review (London), put it in 1950, “The present is a moment of crisis, not any longer because we need modern architecture, but because we have got it.”28
To be sure, although Haskell was an early critic of modern architecture, he was certainly not the only one. In a keynote presentation at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in 1936, the Philadelphia architect, archaeologist, and art historian Leicester B. Holland could already describe modern architecture’s functionalism as a “cult,” presciently adding that, like other architectural cults, it was invariably valueless and soon to become the trivial plaything of magazine advertisements. In his paper “The Function of Functionalism,” Holland observed that if the function of functionalism was “just to combat a popular hankering after period decoration, it is fighting a losing battle against straw men, for it can only substitute one fashion for another.”29
Holland’s critique echoed through the twentieth century. Playing with the modernist dictum “form follows function,” he invented others, including “form is a fiction that flowers out of function.” Anticipating later criticism, he condemned as “diabolic” the doctrine that “Commodity and Firmness are alone essential to Well Building, and that Form or Delight is not in itself functional.” With a conviction that the Vitruvian architectural triad of firmness, commodity, and delight still had meaning in modern times, he mocked the over-“exposure of construction” in favor of a more modest “expression of construction.” Using the analogy of the human body, he offered that it is “one thing for an athlete to slough his restricting garments, and quite another to have a visitor take off his overcoat, and then all his other clothes, and skin, as well.”30
By 1940, functionalism had become the focus of an early attempt to establish regular architectural criticism in Anglo-American architectural journalism. In a column titled “Criticism” in The Architectural Review, J. M. Richards opined that the problem of interpreting functionalism stemmed in large part from the polemical statements of early modern architects themselves. Writing under the pseudonym “James MacQuedy,” the young architect and writer explained that the “overstressing of functionalism in the past for propaganda purposes by the prophets of modernism themselves has led to much of the present misunderstanding.” It was clear enough to anyone who has studied Le Corbusier’s books and his buildings, he explained, that the great architect’s provocative and much-quoted remark about a house being a machine a habiter was a clever bit of rhetoric and one that had exactly the iconoclastic effect it was meant to have. “It was intended to epater le bourgeois, not to state an architectural philosophy,” Richards observed.31
Richards—the critic for a magazine that would have a great influence on Haskell, Forum, and Jacobs—accordingly sought to move beyond functionalist rhetoric and popular misconceptions. The popular belief that “modern architects are ‘functionalists,’ and rely on efficiency to produce beauty of its own accord,” he offered, “has been reiterated quite as often as the error that makes a disclaimer necessary.” Richards believed that it was time to leave behind an exclusive concern for “sheer reasonableness and efficiency” in architectural design.32
However, alternatives to the strict observance of modernist tenets were difficult to identify and defend. In a notable countercritique, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock effectively demonstrated how little room there was to avoid the charge of catering to public taste. In 1946, they criticized one of the pioneers of functionalist architecture, J. J. P. Oud, for “slipping back” into a popular architectural language with his design for the Shell Building (1942) in The Hague. “What did Oud find lacking in his earlier approaches?” they asked. “In this instance was he unconsciously slipping back into an easily popular answer or was he seeking something new?”33
In reply, Oud turned the table by defending his design for the Shell Building in functional terms. Alluding to his canonical functionalist workers’ housing and factory buildings of the 1920s, he stated that he didn’t believe in applying the forms of housing and factories to office buildings, town halls, and churches. By contrast, he explained that an ornamental relief, which adorned the Shell Building’s entrance and was ridiculed by Johnson and Hitchcock as “embroidery,” fulfilled a “spiritual function.” Oud also defended the building for being a great success functionally, despite transgressing some of the functionalist tenets of the 1920s. “Do you know that the Shell Building up to now already has been used for five years—sometimes by 600, sometimes by 1,000 employees—and that I never heard one complaint about the practical functioning of the building?” he wrote. “What do you think ‘functionalism’ could do more in this respect? And why should it be forbidden to give functional doing a spiritual form? Functioning alone as a leading principle—my experience taught me this— results in aesthetic arbitrariness,” Oud countered.34
After World War II, the critique of functionalism intensified. The war and its conclusion with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 dispelled many people’s faith—including that of Le Corbusier and other spokesmen of the Machine Age associated with the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)—in the emancipatory powers of the machine and similar symbols of progress. As Richards and the editors of The Architectural Review wrote in a column titled “The Functional Tradition,” “The most sinister thing about the atom bomb is not so much that it may go off as that whether it goes off or not, its effects tend to be the same. Western civilization rests on its oars, awaits the issue. Result, a very appreciable slowing down of what used to be called Progress or the March of Events.”35
By 1947, Richards could state that functionalism, the only real aesthetic faith to which modern architects could lay claim in the interwar years, was now called into question, if not repudiated, by opponents and former supporters alike. The new question was how to address functionalism’s shortcomings. Prefiguring some of the ideas that he and his colleagues, and later Jacobs, would develop, Richards offered an article titled “The New Empiricism” as a step toward a less abstract modernism, one that would seek “to humanize theory on its aesthetic side and to get back to the earlier rationalism on the technical side.” Appealing to rationalists, he argued that the New Empiricism brought modern social and life sciences into the picture: “Man and his habits, reactions and needs are the focus of interest as never before,” he observed. Initially applied to the humanistic modernism of Scandinavia, New Empiricism, as Richards saw it, was part of a widespread tendency, as architects around the world faced the challenge of postwar rebuilding efforts. “That this tendency is not purely a Swedish one is obvious from the concern being expressed in other countries,” Richards wrote, “where other empiricists apparently fear that the enormous postwar opportunities of rebuilding may too easily result in the stereotyping of the functionalism of the thirties under the old argument of establishing it as the international vernacular.”36
Only a few months later, in October 1947, these words echoed around the United States, where Lewis Mumford, a longtime critic of functionalist architecture, quoted Richards’s repudiation of it. In an article that became better known than its inspiration, Mumford laid out an American version of Richards’s essay on “Sweden’s latest style,” linking New Empiricism with the “Bay Region style” of the U.S. West Coast. “What was called functionalism,” Mumford wrote, “was a one-sided interpretation of function, and it was an interpretation that Louis Sullivan, who popularized the slogan ‘Form follows function,’ never subscribed to.” The so-called Rigorists, like Giedion and Le Corbusier, he argued, had elevated “the mechanical functions of a building above its human functions; they neglected the feelings, the sentiments, and the interests of the person who was to occupy it. Instead of regarding engineering as a foundation for form, they treated it as an end.” Mumford, by contrast, advocated “the continued spread, to every part of our country, of that native and human form of modernism which one might call the Bay Region style, a free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life on the Coast.”37
Because of what was at stake for Modernism’s champions, Mumford’s attack on orthodox modern architecture and the International Style sparked further debate. In response, Hitchcock and MOMA director Alfred Barr organized the 1948 symposium “What Is Happening to Modern Architecture?” Although this rhetorical question alluded to the New Empiricism that was springing up in Sweden, England, the United States, and elsewhere, the primary purpose of the conference was to defend the International Style and to separate it from the now-disfavored functionalism. Barr was quick to point out in his introductory remarks that, “in spite of every effort on our part, the term [International Style] has often been used interchangeably with the word, ‘functionalism.’” It was true, he continued, that “the principle of functionalism helped generate the new architectural forms of the 1920’s and thereby contributed to the International Style, but functionalism was and still is a principle of building design which stops short of architecture.” To distinguish the International Style as a new phenomenon, “We even considered using the term, ‘post-functionalism,’ to make absolutely clear that the new style was superseding functionalism,” but this was not an adequate description of the movement they sought to identify. Thus, in spite of the deficiencies of the label, “it was obvious that the style had been born and needed a name. … Since then, architects and critics alike have questioned the term, often referring to it as the ‘so-called’ International Style; yet no one since that time has thought of a better term.”38
FIGURE 19. Lewis Mumford speaking at the Museum of Modern Art symposium “What Is Happening to Modern Architecture?,” 1948. Roy Stevens.
After defending the International Style, Barr and Hitchcock counterattacked. Ignoring Mumford’s or Richards’s underlying regionalist approach, they condescendingly described Bay Region architecture, the American counterpart of the New Empiricism, as the “New Cottage Style.” To underscore the supremacy of their architectural idiom, they observed that Bay Region architects such as William Wurster, Bernard Maybeck, and others resorted to the International Style when designing office and institutional buildings. “It is significant,” Barr observed, “that when such a master of the Cottage Style as William Wurster is faced with a problem of designing an office building or a great project for the United Nations, he falls back upon a pretty orthodox version of the International Style.” Shutting out other modernisms, Hitchcock added that “it has seemed to me almost as if we could now consider International Style to be synonymous with the phrase ‘Modern Architecture.’”39 For a few more years, Hitchcock’s 1948 definition of modern architecture as the International Style prevailed. But his seemingly unequivocal faith in the style was near its end.
As Haskell predicted in 1932 in his review of Johnson and Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture exhibit, by the early 1950s, the International Style had become “what the man about town will build.” While many Americans were indeed unwilling to accept the machine a habiter for their domestic lives, Lever House (1952), the first significant postwar office building in the modern idiom, showed that corporate America had fully embraced the International Style. Meanwhile, “Googie architecture”—a term named after a Los Angeles restaurant called Googie’s and coined by Haskell to describe the emergence of modern architecture in popular and commercial forms— expressed a “progressive” sentiment in popular culture. However, for many architects, both corporate and popular modernism indicated the degradation of modern architecture’s formal and social aspirations into a consumable architectural style. As the International Style’s advocates themselves had long been aware, becoming just another style would undermine modern architecture’s raison d’etre.40
Thus, in 1951, a year before Jacobs joined Architectural Forum, one of modern architecture’s greatest defenders admitted that a historic line of thinking had run its course. In a 1951 essay, “The International Style Twenty Years After,” Hitchcock admitted that the International Style had developed into “a form of academicism … in prominent architectural schools and in large highly institutionalized offices.” While taking pride in his role in defining an important historical movement, he concluded that “we stand now at another change of phase in modern architecture between a ‘high’ and a ‘late’ period.” Resigned to debasement and decline, Hitchcock wrote, we “must expect many vagaries in reaction against the too literal interpretation of the International Style” and “an academic current which is encouraging the repetition of established formulas without creative modulation.”41
Having entered the period of Late Modernism, the fundamental question was what would come next—what could possibly come after Modernism, let alone “late modernism”? This was the architectural crisis, soon compounded by an urban crisis, that Jacobs faced as a fledgling architectural critic.
Richards knew that a new revolution was not the answer. He had faith in the liveliest of all the attributes of the human character: “its ability to change profoundly while essentially remaining the same.” The answer, he wrote in “The Next Step?,” was not to abandon functionalism, but to conceive of a “functionalism of the particular”:
There is therefore no call to abandon functionalism in the search
for an architectural idiom capable of the full range of expression
its human purposes require; only to understand functionalism
itself, by its very nature, implies the reverse of what it is often
allowed to imply: not reducing everything to broad
generalizations—quality in architecture belongs to the exact, not
the approximate—but relating it ever more closely to the essential
particulars of time and place and purpose. That is the level on
which humanity and science meet.42
FIGURE 20. Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was a pioneering work of late modern architecture and “corporate modernism.” Getty Images.
FIGURE 21. “Googie Architecture” by Douglas Haskell, House & Home, Feb. 1952, 8586. The term described populist and “uninhibited” modern architecture. In the postwar period, modern architecture was recognized in professional circles as being in intellectual crisis at just the time that it was embraced by the public.
Although it is unlikely that Jacobs read this essay at the time—she was still working at the State Department when it came out—it exemplified the ideas and writing that made Haskell, Jacobs, and their colleagues at Forum great admirers of The Architectural Review. Indeed, not only did Haskell’s team read the Review and follow its debates, Haskell shaped the new editorial agenda for architectural criticism with the Review in mind. In one of his first major editorials following Forum’s “inauguration” of architectural criticism, Haskell would echo Richards’s sentiment: “Now we cry for human architecture. Modern architecture can no longer live on its promise of simple functionalism.”43
The influence on Jacobs was ultimately important and direct: The concept of the “functionalism of the particular” was taken up by Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn, Jacobs’s counterparts at the Review, with whom she would collaborate in the years before she wrote Death and Life. As she recalled decades later, in the foreword to the Modern Library edition of her book, the writers at The Architectural Review were especially influential on her thinking about architecture and the city and her effort to expose “the unworkability and joylessness of anticity visions.” Her book, which she described in its earliest phase as “a study of the relation of function to design in large cities,” would be part of a long effort to reframe the modern functionalist tradition.44
Despite the need for architectural criticism, the tradition had withered in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the decades preceding the postwar period. As Richards wrote in a November 1950 editorial, there was then “no regular criticism of current architecture comparable with art criticism, dramatic criticism, or music criticism” because of the threat of libel suits. In a memo to his executive editors a year later, Haskell paraphrased Richards’s argument in making a case for a more critical editorial agenda at Forum. However, despite the concessions Haskell had won by the time Jacobs had joined his staff, progress was slow. It would take until the late 1950s—just the time that Jacobs was prepared to attack urban renewal practices—for expectations to change, and even then her writing would be considered shocking.45
Haskell had decades of experience with the limits of American architectural criticism and had long worked to push the boundaries since the 1930s, when he became an architectural critic for The Nation and wrote freelance articles for Architectural Record and other magazines. As compared to the professional architecture magazines, however, more rigorous architectural criticism was possible in The Nation because the professional magazines had to maintain working relationships with architects and had therefore developed gentlemen’s agreements and codes of conduct that maintained a status quo. And even in magazines of general readership, caution was necessary when critiquing a building. In writing his “Sky Line” column for The New Yorker, for example, Mumford often omitted architects’ names in order to avoid the threat of a libel suit.
In fact, before 1964, when the Supreme Court ruled strongly in favor of the freedoms of speech and press in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, publishers were frequently threatened with lawsuits over statements that architects deemed harmful to their reputations. As Talbot Hamlin observed in the 1930 essay “Criticism Might Help Architecture: Let’s Try It?,” an architect criticized in print looks for “a dollars-and-cents remedy and runs to court with a libel suit.” This distressingly prevalent attitude, Hamlin continued, undermined “any definite attempt to evaluate current work, save by means of praise or simple description; adverse criticism can only be hinted in the most general terms.”46
Recalling the writing of one of America’s first architectural critics, Montgomery Schuyler, Hamlin lamented a bygone age of lively criticism: “Gone are those bold days of Montgomery Schuyler’s ‘Architectural Aberrations’ that enlivened the Architectural Record of the nineties. … [Now] even the better class magazines generally avoid actual criticism; the ogre of a libel suit not unjustly stares at them continually from afar, and even a witty criticism may bring the architect pouncing down with bared claws.” In concluding his essay, Talbot expressed the hope that, someday, “some architectural magazine [would] establish a column of sound and careful criticism.”47
Haskell harbored the same hope for many decades. When he joined Architectural Record as a full-time associate editor in 1943, more than a decade after his temporary position at that magazine had begun, architectural criticism remained problematic. What Hamlin had actually failed to mention was that even Schuyler’s “Architectural Aberrations” column— which had run from 1891 to 1913, when Record was a young and rambunctious magazine—had been published anonymously and that the architects whose buildings were criticized went unnamed. As Peter Blake later wrote, Record was “a favorite with advertisers: it made no waves.” For that reason, Blake explained, “Doug was not especially happy on its staff—he was an old-fashioned American radical.”48
So, in 1949, when Henry Luce and Perry Prentice, Architectural Forum’s publisher, offered Haskell a job, he took the position in part because he saw his promotion as a chance to reinvent American architectural criticism. At the first opportunity, in November 1951, with subscriptions at record numbers, he hoped that Luce and Prentice would repay his efforts with support for taking Forum in a new direction.49
Haskell’s first attempt at establishing a regular column of architectural criticism at Forum was tentatively called the “Monsters column.” Reminiscent of Schuyler’s “Architectural Aberrations,” “Monsters” would chastise the worst architecture and make a case for reinvigorated principles. Soliciting confidential nominations for the award of “most monstrous” postwar architectural projects from a handful of prominent architects, he described his goal as isolating “what might be called illiterate efforts by large enterprises whose public responsibility demands that they not uglify their respective cities.” Haskell’s associate editors, including Blake, supported the column, as did the architects contacted for “monstrous” nominations.50
Prentice had reservations, however. “I am all for the Monsters story,” he wrote in a brief memo, “but I think we should get legal advice on it before we publish it.” The executive editor, Joe Hazen, concurred. “Doug,” he wrote, “please give me a memo on your plans for this department and I’ll check the legality.” Haskell replied with a draft of the first column. “You might submit the following to the lawyers,” he wrote Hazen, “as a probable lead.”51
What Haskell submitted for the lawyers’ perusal was an editorial that would never be published, but it was the first step toward the criticism about urban redevelopment and urban design that Jacobs would develop. Although he focused on a critique of functionalist and utilitarian architecture, Haskell made a case for architecture and for a new architectural criticism that recognized architecture’s civic design responsibility and its larger place in the arts. To call attention to this situation, the “Monsters” column would discuss how examples of each of the three most public modern building types— governmental, commercial/industrial, and institutional—had failed to live up to their potential and responsibilities to cities and society.
Haskell’s premise was that, in earlier times, “important buildings were all carefully weighed to get the best not only in utility but in architectural art.” However, in the mid-twentieth century, he observed, “Our highly placed officials … have many of them forgotten the old discussion … that whereas building is for utility, architecture is an art.”52
Haskell’s critique was two-pronged. On one hand, he argued that functionalist architecture and architectural utilitarianism, which had been thoroughly embraced by the larger culture, had to be reformed. “The great public buildings, the great commercial buildings, the great industrial buildings, and the great institutional buildings have a job to do beyond satisfying practical requirements. They represent not only the institutions that they house but, in a broader sense, the culture of the United States.” On the other hand, he argued that the nation’s leading citizens had an obligation to improve the built environment and that a new case had to be made for civic design: “The old literacy about architecture has regrettably gone lost. The idea that it is an obligation on the part of leading citizens to improve the streets, roadsides [sic] of their country not only in point of wealth but as a visual treat seems somehow to fail even to register.”53
To avoid worrying the lawyers, Haskell carefully directed criticism away from architects and assigned responsibility to an abstract class of “highly placed officials,” “leading citizens,” and “supposed leaders.” Moreover, no criticism would be made of these buildings’ “usefulness, of their efficiency, of their adequacy to the program for which they were set up,” he conceded. “We are, in other words, not criticizing them as buildings. We are criticizing them as architecture.” In doing so, Forum would strive to end the confusion that “satisfying the physical functions ended their duty and … that a well-functioning building must turn out beautiful simply because it is practical.” Finally, he argued that he and his staff would be doing nothing very different that what was done in other cultural arenas. Architectural criticism, he argued in conclusion, echoing Richards, “should be on a par with that of art, music, the theater, and other cultural manifestations.”54
Despite all of these arguments, libel fears killed the “Monsters” column. Following Prentice’s request, Hazen dug up a 1937 legal memo written to Prentice’s predecessor, who had established the magazine’s cautious editorial policy. As had been explained to the former publisher by counsel in 1937, “fair comment of architectural works is privileged in precisely the same manner and to precisely the same extent as fair comment on other matters of public interest.” Published statements of fact, if true, were immune from liability. However, comment or opinion, in order to come within the protection of “fair comment,” had to pertain to matters of public interest, not assert alleged matters of fact, and had to be fair. In other words, the architectural critic was fully justified in criticizing architectural failures that could be measured with a ruler but was on shakier ground when stating that a building was “not in keeping with its surroundings”— the truth or falsity of which would be a matter of opinion and “not susceptible of satisfactory proof since there may be (and usually are) honest differences of opinion.” And, of course, if the critic’s opinion was not fair—if it was spoken with malice, ill will, or was other than “a fair minded man might reasonably hold”—the critic and the magazine’s publisher could be found guilty of libel. Just describing a building as not respecting the urban context or as being at odds with civic design principles could therefore land the critic in some trouble.55
Moreover, from the publisher’s point of view, outspoken criticism was not good for business. The business of running an architectural magazine was a competitive one, and journals vied for rights to publish stories about the best buildings by the best architects, while avoiding wasted pages and praise on projects that might later be seen as lesser works. Haskell and, to a lesser extent, his associate editors accordingly spent much of their time in building relationships with the most publishable architects and in negotiating the layout, number of pages, and cover image privilege with architects whose work they wanted to publish. Haskell knew that Forum criticized the work of notable and famous architects, like the young Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Le Corbusier, at its peril. A wrong word could result in Wright or another exclusive story going to another magazine. Wright, in fact, frequently threatened this. A famous story at Forum involved an unexpected visit from Wright, who, while poking around the managing editor George Nelson’s office, came upon an unfavorable review of his updated Autobiography by newcomer Peter Blake. Enraged by what he read, Wright stormed out of the office, leaving in his wake the expectation that Blake would be fired immediately and that Wright would sever his connections with the magazine, which, in Blake’s words, had invested “very large sums of money in buttering up the old egomaniac in the manner to which he had become accustomed.” However, Wright was quickly assured of a better review by a senior editor, which was soon delivered by Nelson himself. Despite Wright’s thorough hatred of the city, the magazine’s relationship with him is likely why he escaped Jacobs’s censure in Death and Life; since she was planning to return to Forum after her book was published, she could not risk antagonizing her magazine’s most valuable editorial property.56
Lawyerly caution and self-censorship thus prevailed into the early 1950s, the McCarthy years, and beyond. In February 1952, only a few months before Jacobs arrived, Haskell’s article on “Googie architecture,” published in one of the first issues of House & Home, gives a sense of what this meant. Despite his senior position, Haskell’s next attempt at criticism took the form of a morality tale reminiscent of Louis Sullivan’s turn-of-the-century writings. In a heavy-handed conceit, Haskell spoke through the voice of a fictional professor (Professor Thrugg), who explained to his reader-students that “Googie” architecture, aka “Modern Architecture Uninhibited,” revealed the architects’ Howard Roark complexes. Like The Fountainhead’s hero, they seemed continually compelled to create unprecedented works through the exploitation of abstract form, modern construction methods, and new materials. “The Googie architect,” opined the professor, feels “that somehow he has to surpass everybody if he can—and that includes Frank Lloyd Wright.”57
Although it now appears mild and quaint, Haskell later described this essay as not only serious criticism, but also “definitely dangerous since it pointed out specific examples”—even though the three projects in question, all presented anonymously, were a student’s design project, the Googie’s restaurant in Los Angeles, and an apartment building in Houston.58
Further tempering his criticism, Haskell characteristically found a number of genuinely favorable things to say about the works. For example, Googie architecture was said to have “brought modern architecture down from the mountains and set ordinary clients, ordinary people, free.” Like Jacobs, he believed that “sometimes fantastically good ideas result from uninhibited experiment.” And he opined that “Googie accustoms the people to expect strangeness, and makes them the readier for those strange things yet to come which will truly make good sense.”59
Nevertheless, the popular phenomenon of Googie architecture and its Formica boomerangs convinced Haskell of the necessity of real and robust architectural criticism. What was needed in a world of populist modern architecture were responsible critics who could separate good ideas from the bad and simply strange. The ordinary people now interested in modern architecture had neither education nor leaders to guide them. Caught between mortgage lenders who inhibited innovation “on one side and Googie geniuses on the other, how can they know their way? There are no responsible critics in the middle!” Through architectural criticism, Haskell offered, “something better than accidental discoveries might come even from Googie.” Criticism was needed to guide both the public and the profession.60
Jacobs did not appear as a permanent fixture on the Forum masthead until September 1952. However, within two months of her trial assignment, she was freely stating frank and even sardonic opinions of which buildings were worthy of publication in the magazine.
In a July 1952 memo to Haskell typical of their interoffice and personal communication during the decade ahead, Jacobs offered critiques of a new school, a hospital addition, and a housing project for the elderly, recommending the publication of the school project and rejecting the others. Focusing her comments on use or function, broadly conceived, not aesthetics, Jacobs observed that the school design, with internal organization like “little neighborhood units” and general adaptability, presented a model of a “reasonable, flexible way to go about school building under certain circumstances.” By contrast, she was dubious about the hospital design, particularly the addition’s connection to the old building, the phasing of additional expansion plans, and other decisions that apparently had “no thinking behind them.” Jacobs had discussed the project directly with the architect, who left their meeting saying he would get back to her with answers to her various questions. She wrote Haskell wryly that “I encouraged him to do [this] because I secretly thought that even though we would not use this [building in the publication], supposing the reasoning is as faulty as I suspect, these are things he ought to know anyhow.” Describing the elderly housing project, Jacobs’s empathy came to the fore. She criticized the architect for knowing nothing about the “people it will house, how long they are apt to live there (he never heard anybody bring that up), whether they bring or would like to bring anything with them, etc. They are numbers, one to a bed. It is a barracks.” Her remarks anticipated the criticisms she would later make of public housing projects then on architects’ drawing boards.61
Such editorial work, which included meeting architects and discussing their projects, sometimes visiting buildings in person, discussing with Haskell and other associate editors what to publish, and collaborating on articles, occupied much of Jacobs’s time at Forum, when she was not working on her own stories. For her first few years, when the magazine continued its practice of publishing staff articles without a byline, she remained focused on hospitals and schools, although soon thereafter a new large-scale building type, the regional shopping mall, became part of her repertoire. Following Haskell’s agenda of a critical approach to building types, the magazine’s theme for 1953 was “New Thinking,” with monthly features on new thinking regarding hotels, industrial buildings, parking garages, college buildings, and so on. In 1953, most issues therefore included an article by Jacobs on a new school and a new hospital, with special editions including a hospitals issue in May 1953 and a schools issue in October 1953.
By focusing on hospitals, schools, and shopping centers, and covering a geographic territory that included Philadelphia, among the architects whose friendships Jacobs cultivated were the Philadelphia architects Vincent Kling and Louis Kahn, and Victor Gruen, a pioneer in shopping center design. Some of these relationships became quite close and influential, whether or not their names later appeared in Death and Life, but initially it was all business. A letter from Haskell to Kling, in which they negotiated putting one of Kling’s projects on the cover, gives a good sense of Jacobs’s role at the magazine. After pitching Kling with Forum’s growing circulation and its number of published prize-winning projects—“There is rarely an important job that hasn’t appeared first in the Forum,” he wrote—Haskell said he would wait for Jacobs’s opinion. “As for promising ahead of time that we’ll give you the cover, that I can’t yet do, not having seen the material,” Haskell told Kling. “We really can’t dispose of space in the Forum on a competitive basis with other magazines—the strength of Forum has always lain in the fact that the editors were free to splurge themselves on really good stories. If the opinion of Mrs. Jacobs, our very competent hospital editor, counts for anything, I would say there is a mighty good chance in the case of Hunterdon [Hospital].” Ultimately, Kling’s hospital got six pages in Jacobs’s December 1953 article “Hospital for the Well,” but not the cover; the issue was dedicated to new churches, and so was the cover.62
Jacobs’s early interactions with Gruen were similar, typically including discussion about when and what would be published. As she wrote Haskell in a March 1953 memo, “This morning I was talking with Victor Gruen, and I suggested that when Southdale [Shopping Center] is finished it would be interesting to do a story on the design of the separate stores within the center. He replied that Northland [Shopping Center], being closer to completion, would be a much better vehicle for this. … He also said that if we plan to do Northland he would like a firm promise on it from us as he has the other magazines at his heels.” In the end, Jacobs recommended a feature story for when the project was finished, which she visited and wrote up for publication in June 1954.63
With others, including Kahn, Jacobs was more aggressive about pursuing rights and agreements to publish certain projects. Although Kahn was still early in his career, she was captivated by his creative mind and work. In May 1955, she summarized a long meeting with him by saying that Forum needed to get the rights to publish Kahn’s Mill Creek housing project and “Trenton Bath House”:
If any or all of these prospects seems as interesting to you as they did to me, I think a note from DH [Douglas Haskell] expressing our interest and wishes to see them would be good. [Kahn] is being very coy about letting us use his Mill Creek housing in July—in fact at this point is saying leave it out (because it will be along with other people’s work!!). I have a plot to try to get him to change his mind, which I hope works, and it would probably help if he got a note expressing interest in these other things—especially Trenton which we ought to get our hooks into soon if we want it.64
Apart from a behind-the-scenes look at Jacobs’s work at the magazine, the memo is remarkable both because of her enthusiasm for Kahn’s work and because the Mill Creek housing project was one that later changed Jacobs’s mind about such urban redevelopment projects. At the time, however, she expressed no doubts and did not criticize Kahn later (at least directly) because of her lingering admiration. When they were new projects, she described Kahn’s Trenton Bath House and Yale Art Gallery as delightful, imaginative, and marvelous creations, and she sought to convince Haskell of their virtues:
[Kahn] has a structure for an outdoor swimming pool in Trenton on which bids are to come in this week. It seemed to me a marvellous creation. The columns are actually little rooms (he is all for hollow columns, the interiors of which are used), some of them for toilets, some for the mazes by which people enter and leave the dressing areas. … The roofs will be awnings, very gaily particolored, stretched over space frames. The space frames make V’s on the roof down which the water will pour when it rains, and the water will spout off like fountains. The main areas are a women’s dressing room, a men’s ditto, and a common space, sort of a lobby, between. It should be completed by this fall. It seems to me that it will be most delightful, and its structure is certainly imaginative.65
FIGURE 22. The Mill Creek housing project by Louis Kahn, with Anne Tyng, commissioned in 1950 and seen here in 1956. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, De Lellis Gallery for John Ebstel.
And although “marvellous” was not a word Jacobs used often, she found occasion to use it two more times in her summary of the recently completed Yale Art Gallery:
Doug, [Kahn’s] idea of how he would do the Yale Art Gallery over is that instead of 27 or some such number of columns, he would have only 9, of a vastly more ingenious form. From there on, his idea takes off on the subject of columns and spaceframes and does not pursue the Art Gallery further. He has marvellous sketches (he showed me slides of them) and marvellous constructions which would make terrific photographs. If he does the article at all the way he ran through this with me, it would not be “How I Would Do the Yale Art Gallery Now” (though that could be the lead-off, and a very good one), but instead on what ideas he has on framing. If the sketches and photos kept popping up in the article with his words, I think it would be terrific. He sure has some mind.66
Although Jacobs would later acquire the reputation for being opposed to modern architecture, and is not usually thought of as interested in architectural structures, her praise for Kahn’s work was fully consistent with her characteristic interest in invention, experimentation, and function. In Death and Life, she praised the Lever House (published in Architectural Forum, June 1952), the Pepsi-Cola Building (1960), and the Union Carbide Building (1960)—all designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) as “masterpieces of modern design.” Although Kahn, like Wright and Buckminster Fuller, escaped her reproach in the book, he could hardly be described as an “orthodox” thinker with “stultifying” ideas—two of her harshest epithets.67
In her work for Forum, another project review that exemplified her attitude toward modern architecture, as well as her work on buildings other than hospitals, schools, and shopping centers, was her study of the models and plans of Lorimer & Rose Architects’ design for City College of New York’s new library (now the college’s School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture) in 1954. Impressed by the organization and functional distributions of the plan, she informed Haskell, “It has one of those remarkable simplicities of plan and organization that never turn up, somehow, without a great deal of analysis and thought.” An example of this was the vertical organization of primary building functions in terms of the visitors’ use of the building. “There is a very good allocation of functions by floors,” she observed. “The first floor, with standard texts and the ‘study hall’ elements, peels off most of the users; the second floor is the main reference section, and takes off most of those remaining; the top floor has special, less used reference sections. … In excess space above the ramp endings are the carrels, which are used by fewest people and also, it seems to me, are properly placed psychologically, up in the attic away from it all.” On the other hand, Jacobs was disappointed by some of the building’s detailing. “While the general fenestration looks swell on the model,” she reported, “I wonder how it will look in the finished building. Possibly if the grid that holds it is bold and strong looking enough, it will come off.”68
However, Jacobs’s greatest disappointment concerned the primary circulation and organizing element, a ramp on the entrance side connecting the sidewalk and the building’s three floors. To best reveal the functional order of the building, she thought that the ramp should have been made visible through the use of clear glass instead of opaque stone walls, glass block, and corrugated wire-glass. She was sorry to learn that this more dramatic design approach had been rejected as too radical. “I think it is a shame the ramp was not made visible across the front of the building; it would have been very dramatic,” she wrote. “It was not, because the city did not want to maintain the glass area, and because there was reluctance to be so ‘radical’ in design. Visually, the thing is left as a distinct element, with blank limestone facing and narrow glass walls at the ends, but it gives no hint of what it is. A pedestrian solution and a great chance missed.”69
City College’s library, in other words, was a smaller, architectural version of an argument she would later make in Death and Life. Design, as she offered there, should pursue “a strategy of illuminating and clarifying life and helping to explain to us its meanings and order.”70 In the case of the library, a transparent ramp not only would have enhanced the urbanity of the local context by contributing “eyes on the street,” but also would have dramatically illuminated the building’s functional order. A more radical design would have revealed how both the building and the city worked.
In Death and Life and beyond, Jacobs remained committed to the concept of functional architecture. Asked in 1962, in a postpublication interview, “How much do you think that fashionable architecture has to do with the disease of cities?,” Jacobs responded at length in functional terms. Architects, she replied, had fallen back on novelty in their abandonment of functionalism. “If [architects] had an esthetic based on function, on the way things work, they wouldn’t have to fall back on nice effects, novelties, grotesque exaggerations,” she explained. Recalling the roots of modern architecture, she continued: “Function, which is supposed to be the basis of modern architecture, has almost unnoticed taken on a very different meaning from that it had in the beginning. Then function was meant the way a building was used. Frank Lloyd Wright revolutionized the home on this basis. … Various buildings were really rethought in these terms.” But human use had been replaced by self-reference and autonomy: “now function has come to mean not the way the building is used, but the function of the structure itself, the function of the material. So that architecture with a capital A has become more and more interested in itself and less and less interested in the world that uses it.”71
Jacobs went on to conclude that the “lack of attention to function today is not just a disease of architecture or city planning”—it was a societal problem. Making an analogy between locomotives that revealed their workings and the streamlined style that came later, she observed, “People no longer seem to know how things work. Idealized designs of many kinds ignore what objects do, or conceal what they do and how they do it. It’s like locomotives we used to see, with their wheels and the whole business exposed. Then a skirt was put over them, concealing as much as possible. Much of what is called design today is cover-up.” Her thought was similar to one she had made in Death and Life, where she wrote, “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give.”72
Jacobs was thus very much a modernist: A good design revealed how things worked. While supportive of preserving historic buildings, she did not advocate the design approach later known as “contextualism”—the idea that a new building design should be generated by mimicking the stylistic and formal precedents of its neighbors. Quite the contrary, as an advocate of visual diversity and innovation, she rejected the idea that architectural design should create aesthetically disciplined environments. Unlike design contextualists, she believed that the Gesamtkunstwerk approach—the attempt to create cities as a total work of art—was a reflection or symptom of a closed, controlled, or arrested society. Such environments, she wrote in Death and Life, may “look to us like works of art in their physical totality” and we may regard them with “admiration or a kind of nostalgia.” However, she believed that aesthetic discipline was a reflection of social discipline: “the limitations on possibilities and the strictures on individuals in such societies extend much beyond the materials and conceptions used in creating works of art from the grist of everyday life.” Architectural style and aesthetics imposed on a city or a city neighborhood could be regarded not only as “cover-ups” of the inner workings or actual functioning of buildings or cities, but also as a form of social control.73
