THE FOUNTAINHEAD SYNDROME

For her best-selling book The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand found inspiration in the work and life of Frank Lloyd Wright. For the overheated 1949 movie rendition, King Vidor found the visual counterpart to Rand's cool superhero-architect Howard Roark in Gary Cooper. Now that Michael Cimino is planning a remake of the original, SUZANNE STEPHENS proposes that the updated version draw its inspiration from a diverse quar tet of contemporary architects. Photographs of the four by HORST.

Michael Cimino’s plans for remaking the film of The Fountainhead—Ayn Rand’s allegorical potboiler about architecture—seem hopelessly nostalgic. Who could possibly match the steamy melodrama and mythic posturing of the original version? The 1949 movie, for which Ayn Rand wrote the screenplay, starred a flinty, forty-eight-year-old Gary Cooper as the indomitable architect Howard Roark. Roundly panned by the reviewers, the film, with its optimistic fiction of the individual architect’s power to change society, nevertheless still enthralls the public on late-night television.

Even the unwieldy best-selling book on which the film was based has sold almost four million copies since it was published in 1943. Its broadly drawn architect-hero Roark never falters in his unending struggle to establish an invulnerable citadel of modem architecture. Pitted against Roark and his architecture are the forces of collectivism and conservatism: among them, corporations, newspaper empires, and the weakminded masses, who prefer the festooned fripperies of a bygone architecture executed by anonymous drones.

In Rand’s epic extravaganza, the beautiful architecture journalist Dominique Francon, daughter of Guy Francon, the key exponent of “confectionary” classical architecture, falls in love with iconoclast Roark: “She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity.” Testing Roark, she flaunts her relationships with weak men who accept the necessity of humbling compromise. In an ultimate act of perversity Dominique marries Gail Wynand, the Rupert Murdoch-like publisher of the New York Banner who has mounted a campaign against a Roark-designed building. At the denouement, Roark (with the help of Dominique) dynamites a still unoccupied low-cost housing project because changes were made in his design. Dominique’s husband Wynand, won over at last by Roark’s uncompromising integrity, throws his newspaper behind Roark. Roark’s court trial is the setting for a long philosophical exegesis on the rights an individual artist has over his own creations. Roark is acquitted on the basis of a “higher law,” Wynand divorces Dominique (in the movie he shoots himself), Roark marries Dominique. He goes on to erect higher and higher buildings, she to dam his socks.

Despite the fact that Rand loosely based the tale on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, few architects who grew up in the decade after the book and the movie came out would see the architect-hero as a representative role model for the architectural profession. Granted, such “hero” architects of the 1950s as Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen sculpted extraordinary concrete monoliths in the modernist style for schools and airports. But generally “team design” corporate architectural firms used these boom development years to slather the landscape with glass-and-steel high rises in a watered-down modernist idiom.

In the past fifteen years the T square has shifted. A new breed of Howard Roarks has rekindled the sense of architecture as a creative act. Ironically this “Fountainhead syndrome” is a byproduct of an intensive questioning of the modem movement and its easily achieved debasement. Recently architects have been dealing with architecture as a theoretical problem of form and meaning. (They have also had the showmanship to push their efforts into the spotlight.) But whatever solutions architects propose—whether to develop the abstract planar forms of the modem movement or to return to the massive, symmetrical, ornamented forms of classical architecture—they seem to agree that what separates architecture from engineering is its art, and that the weakness of modem architecture has been its lack of attention to the theory that generates the form.

Out of this past agitation several prominent architects have emerged as the Roarks of the 1980s. Unlike Howard Roark, who saw architecture as an instrument to fight “the forces of collectivism,” they do not seek to change society through architecture. The four pictured on pages 40-43 are committed to a more personal architectural vision. This decade’s Howard Roark doesn’t carry a heavy moral burden. More intellectual and theoretical than Ayn Rand’s hero, he is also more pragmatic. He believes that corporations, developers, and the media can be seduced into supporting his architecture.

Richard Meier comes closest to the stalwart individualist Roark of The Fountainhead. His houses, museums, schools, and hospitals, executed in the modernist vocabulary, remain rarefied and refined exemplars of the style. His stringency and elegance of line and his manipulation of soaring sunlit spaces have great sensuous appeal, but unlike Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stem he has never been accused of creating “consolatory kitsch.” Like Roark he is a steely idealist, and—also like Roark —he is invincible.

In degree of acclaim, Michael Graves approaches Howard Roark’s mythic stature. But unlike Roark with his modem glass, steel, and concrete high rises, Graves concocts classical-looking extravaganzas, with gables, pediments, porticoes, even little temples, all in a limited space. In designing his buildings, Graves puts into practice the theory that certain elements of architecture should be able to be “read”—that there is, for example, a legible way to signify an entrance. Intended to be accessible, his work is also highly controversial because of its complexity, elaborateness, and play on scale. Major commissions like the Portland Building in Oregon or the Humana headquarters now going up in Louisville impel the architecture world to watch Graves very closely.

Like Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stem hews to the historicist as opposed to the modernist line; in fact, his wideranging activities, which include teaching and writing (among his books: George Howe, New Directions in American Architecture, and New York 1900), have done much to build a foundation for his “postmodern” belief system. In his designs, in exhibits and articles, Stem explores with a vengeance the line of thought in Robert Venturi’s seminal 1966 tract Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. And in so doing, Stem has managed to make historical references acceptable to the architectural community. Considered too “ingratiating” by some colleagues and not ingratiating enough by others, the work often features exaggerated motifs and muscular proportions. The superproductive architect is now busy writing Pride of Place, an eight-part television series subsidized by Mobil. When asked what he thought about Cimino’s update of Howard Roark’s tribulations, he said, “What you have here is the story of Sammy Glick.”

Peter Eisenman—Howard Roark as a driven genius with a demonic twist— erected an intellectual empire with little or no money in the space of fifteen years and then withdrew from the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1982 to plunge into private practice. For years Eisenman had concentrated on designing “difficult” houses—hermetic, abstract, cubist affairs that required true commitment to live in them. Now he is consciously going after (and getting) larger commissions, in partnership with Jaquelin Robertson, and his work is looking more “accessible.” There are even some historical allusions in the fortresslike gateway to his visualarts center at Ohio State University. As Eisenman explains his current work (which includes a fire station in Brooklyn and an office building in Hempstead, New York), the nature of the problem affects the language used by the architect: changes in scale mean changes in the intensity and the character of expression. Eisenman used to worry about “design integrity,” but now he is worried about ‘ ‘other things. . . One grows up.”

The mentor of these architects-asartists is not the idealistic, ideological, unsung genius Henry Cameron, who inspired Howard Roark. It is Philip Johnson, another kind of genius. At seventyseven Johnson is the connoisseur of styles. First an avowed modernist, now a historicist, Johnson, with his partner John Burgee, has amassed a remarkable following of “enlightened” developers. He is also a connoisseur of younger architects—influenced often by their work rather than the reverse. To Johnson it doesn’t matter if “the kids” espouse the same architectural tastes and values as his—but they must be original and creative, never boring. Thus he has encouraged the funk-tech artistry of Frank Gehry in Los Angeles, the whimsical Miesian designs of Stanley Tigerman in Chicago, as well as the coruscating diversity of the New York “boys.” His largesse in referrals has kept a generation of younger talents in pinstripes. (As in Roark’s era, architects frequently cannot live on commissions alone—one reason why teaching or designing furniture and other objects holds a particular allure.)

The emergence of this architectural elite in recent years, combined with a growing disposition toward the cult of personality, has fostered the Fountainhead syndrome. First the professional journals—and the New York Times— presented their designs. Next the general-audience publications discovered those designs. Then they discovered the architects. And now the cult of the personality is bringing architects before the camera in documentaries like Michael Blackwood Productions’ Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture (with narration and interviews by Martin Filler and Rosemarie Haag Bletter), which is expected to be aired soon in the United States. In this subversively entertaining portrayal of architects, Frank Gehry cooks some sort of goulash and Peter Eisenman talks theory nonstop at the barber’s, as if to demonstrate that the stuff of everyday life is truly woven into the outpourings of these Ubermenschen-crcators.

Another film, Kings of Infinite Space, coproduced by the BBC and written by its host, architect-historian Charles Jencks, compares the lives and work of artist-architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Michael Graves. Jencks solemnly reminds us, “They have paid a price: continual conflicts, punishing hard work, divorce.. . . But the drive for a total art remained their goal, and perhaps solace, in spite of constant domestic stress.” Divorce, domestic stress. Now we can understand the work.

As the work becomes more and more inextricably linked to the “personality,” the question is whether this obsession with it will continue to stimulate interest in architecture. Or could the cult of personality kill architecture? Will the public’s faddish consumption of architects and their imagery relegate a once favored few to a heap of hasbeens before their normal productive time is up? Architects, because of long years of schooling and apprenticeship and the long haul before they acquire big commissions, are usually most productive in the years between the ages of forty and sixty. Philip Johnson is still on top, but he has proved to be a master at preventing the media’s embrace from engulfing him; nor have the eddying currents of architectural ideologies caught him with his trouser legs unrolled.

The careers of true media folk are dependent upon their ability to sell and manipulate their image. Architects need time to devote to thinking about inert physical objects. They must constantly transform their architecture from within, where the critical act of creation takes place. This generation of architects has gotten our attention, but now, after paving the way for a new architecture, they risk being consumed by the heat of attendant publicity before this architecture has time to emerge. Many of their buildings are too idiosyncratic, too small, or too unresolved to allow more than undigested assimilation by other architects. The next generation is already looking less soigne, less charismatic; these young men and women under forty are quieter, working more often in partnerships. The lone hero-architect may soon be a period piece once again. Cimino should make his version of The Fountainhead fast.