Beauty Under the Cover of Darkness

Why architect students fell in love with the International Style.

This is a sequel to my September 2024 piece “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco.’”

Though I love looking up to the heavens — I once spent six months straight drawing the moon every night that it was visible — it never bothers me that so few stars can be seen above my home in Manhattan. Our shining metropolises represent the complexity and bravado of human ingenuity, encapsulating the intricate mysteries of the universe in microcosm. From my favorite evening walk around the reservoir in Central Park, I have a clear view of Midtown Manhattan, where the Seagram Building and its neighbors glisten in the darkness, and that is the only direction that I want to look towards.

When I argued that “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco,’” I denounced the Seagram Building as a template for ugly architecture:

Monstrosities like the Seagram Building, erected in 1958 by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (often simply called Mies), were designed to vehemently reject all ornamentation. In 1976, the Times described that simple glass box as “one of New York's most copied buildings” that has “provided the inspiration for countless office towers around the world.” The Seagram Building was designed in the International Style, which London's Tate Gallery notes, “is seen as single-handedly transforming the skylines of every major city in the world with its simple cubic forms.”

But when the Seagram Building and its imitators are negated by nightfall, beauty creeps back in. Darkness hides their unadorned flanks, while light leaps out of their glass curtain walls. In a sleepy cityscape, the proliferation of glass boxes replace the Milky Way that their light drowns out — and just as stargazers marvel at the sparkling cosmos, we can delight at the gleaming towers scraping the night sky.

Walter Gropius, who was Mies’ colleague and fellow leader of the Modernist architectural revolution, wanted to make “crystal symbols of a new faith” and “pile up wonders to the sky.” He was influenced by the German utopian author Paul Scheerbart, who composed poems and drew pictures about glass architecture at the beginning of the 20th century. Sheerbart believed that “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last," and he wrote longingly of a world where:

The surface of the earth would change totally if brick buildings were replaced everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the Earth clothed itself in jewellery of brilliants and enamel. The splendour is absolutely unimaginable… and then we should have on earth more exquisite things than the gardens of the Arabian Nights. Then we should have a paradise on earth and would not need to gaze yearningly at the paradise in the sky.

Of this influence, the Australian art critic Robert Hughes observed:

For mainstream modernist architecture owed much more to German Expressionism than one might suppose, and one connection between them was not only glass but a Nietzschean, Romantic idea of the architect as the supreme articulator of social effort. …

Such was the drama of emotion, hope, and expectation surrounding the use of glass among the Utopian architects of Germany. Naturally, other avant-garde architects were touched by it. It was the image of the pure and glittering prism, rather than any “functional" theory, that gave its generating idea to the early work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

To see this, one should look at the designs Mies, at thirty-four, made for the most important architectural competition held in the first years of Weimar Germany — the Turmhaus-AG's Berlin contest for a high-rise building near Friedrichstrasse Station. He wanted it to look like a “polished crystal,” and said so; and in his drawings, it does. Its mass seems volatilized in light, leaving only profiles and reflections: this is the Expressionist tower of purity, sharp angles, crystal-shaded plan, glitter, and all. Later, Mies would reject the Expressionist content of the ice-palace, but his work always retained an obsessive interest in formal absolutes.

While the American historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford considered the International Style a “superficial aesthetic, openly proclaiming its indifference to actual mechanical and biological functions or human purposes," he still described one of those early glass box buildings as a “Crystal Lantern, more gorgeous at night than during the day.” But then the sun rises, and too much illumination unveils the ugliness of the International Style. If only Modernist architects had continued the tradition of the Boley Building in Kansas City and the Hallidie Building in San Francisco — these were the very first glass curtain cubes introduced to American cityscapes, but unlike the austerity of the International Style, their steel frames are adorned with cast iron detailing, terra cotta decorations, and sheet metal friezes — then we could have crystal lanterns at night that would retain their glamour at sunrise.

A minority of people like austere architecture — the last time I walked past Park Avenue and East 53rd Street, a couple was taking wedding photos in front of the Seagram Building.¹ Yet the immense quantity of Modernist buildings is grossly disproportionate to their fan base. And herein lies a fundamental injustice of the International Style: it initiated an extreme cultural shift away from beauty that crippled the creation of new ornamental architecture.

If the number of glass boxes (and subsequent styles of austere architecture) correlated with the diminutive number of those who like them, then we would have a reasonable compromise between people of opposing aesthetic sensibilities. But instead, the fad for ugly cities became nearly all-consuming. New public buildings, corporate offices, and apartment complexes rarely display the lovely adornments that all such buildings expressed before Modernists like Mies had their way with us. And their imposition is inescapable to all who must walk past these structures. The proliferation of austere architecture is a relentless negative externality.

I delve into the genesis of this tragedy in “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco,’” where I also quote at length from Samuel Hughes' comprehensive debunking of the misapprehension that ornament is just too costly nowadays. Hughes also summarizes the mystery of Modern architecture:

…to exaggerate a little, it really did happen that every government and every corporation on Earth was persuaded by the wild architectural theory of a Swiss clockmaker and a clique of German socialists, so that they started wanting something different from what they had wanted in all previous ages. It may well be said that this is mysterious. But the mystery is real, and if we want to understand reality, it is what we must face.

But this mystery begins in the architecture schools. Governments and corporations could not have countless austere buildings without architects enough to build them the world over. How did “a Swiss clockmaker and a clique of German socialists" persuade nearly every architecture student to renounce ornamentation?

Mies and Gropius were among the clique of German socialists who pioneered the International Style. But the second generation of architects who imbibed their aesthetic were not all similarly ideological. Though socialism largely inspired the movement, it cannot explain why early acolytes like Gordon Bunshaft embraced the International Style.

Bunshaft designed Lever House, which stands cattycorner to the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, and actually predates Mies' famous work by several years. Lever House was the second glass curtain skyscraper in New York City. Bunshaft would go on to build so many more that he formulated a stock riposte to snide comments about the repetition: “Yes, and I'm going to keep on doing them until I do one I like.”²

Lever House was built soon after the United Nations Secretariat Building at the UN headquarters, which was New York City's first glass cube. Bunshaft’s mentor, Le Corbusier, took credit for designing the UN building — technically, the project was an international collaboration involving many prominent architects under the direction of Wallace K. Harrison, who designed Rockefeller Center, but Le Corbusier's ego proved most powerful, and he ultimately wrested control over the UN design. Even more than Mies and Gropius, Le Corbusier (the aforementioned Swiss clockmaker) was the most influential founding father of Modern architecture.

In a ten hour-long interview that Bunshaft gave in 1989, the year before his death at age 81, for the Art Institute of Chicago's Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, he asserts the preeminence of Le Corbusier's influence:

Le Corbusier is the main teacher… everything that every young architect did was influenced by Le Corbusier, period. …

He was the main teacher of modern architecture through his books. Then, of course, Mies had a more sophisticated thing, but that came later. Mies didn't publish as early as Le Corbusier and also Mies didn't blossom really until he came to this country. Mies was the Mondrian of architecture, and Le Corbusier was the Picasso. That's very simple.

Robert Hughes agreed, writing that “Corbusier was a great aesthete, and his power to invent form was extraordinary. He was in a sense the Picasso of architecture, because his designs provoke such strong sensations, contain such overmastering rhythms, and display such a muscularity of ‘drawing.’” Books by Le Corbusier were first assigned to architecture students at the Bauhaus, which was the very first school of Modern art and architecture. Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, and Mies was its final director until a Gestapo raid forced him to close the school in 1933; although Mies initially tried to earn architectural commissions from Hitler, and did succeed in designing parts of the Autobahn for the Nazi regime, he and Gropius fled in the late 1930s after securing teaching positions at prestigious American universities.³

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the father of Modern architecture took a French word meaning “the crow-like one"⁴ as his name. Le Corbusier (or “Corbu" for short) was an eccentric obsessed with developing a new doctrine that denounced all previous architectural styles, because he believed that “decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is color, and is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” He fantasized about razing a large chunk of central Paris to replace the elegant buildings that Georges-Eugène Haussmann designed in the previous century,⁵ which define that cityscape to this day, with a series of eighteen identical towers he called “machines for living.” Though the city of Paris sensibly rejected that pitch, Corbu’s followers built a smaller version in a Parisian suburb called “The Silent City,” which the Nazis found suitable for repurposing as a concentration camp during their occupation of France. More of his disturbing machinations are documented in Eric McIntyre's primal scream against Corbu's designs.⁶

The Bauhaus, that first architectural school to assign Le Corbusier’s books, was an ideologically purist environment. As Tom Wolfe quipped in From Bauhaus to Our House, “It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus” where young architects and artists keen on disavowing history “talked about ‘starting from zero.’” Their zeal could become self-parody:

One heard the phrase all the time: “starting from zero.” Gropius gave his backing to any experiment they cared to make, so long as it was in the name of a clean and pure future. Even new religions such as Mazdaznan. Even health-food regimens. During one stretch at Weimar the Bauhaus diet consisted entirely of a mush of fresh vegetables. It was so bland and fibrous they had to keep adding garlic in order to create any taste at all. Gropius' wife at the time was Alma Mahler… [she] could assure you that the most unforgettable characteristic of the Bauhaus style was “garlic on the breath.”

But when Bunshaft first encountered Le Corbusier’s books as an architecture student at MIT — where the Cambridge air was conspicuously free from the fragrance of garlic — it was not ideology that hooked him and his cohort. In his Oral History interview, Bunshaft tells us why they “wanted to be as avant-garde as possible":

I'm not a profound guy. I've never been an intellectual about architecture. I think what led every young man to modern architecture is that he's young and he wants to do what's new. There's no profound discussion about whether he wants to be a traditionalist or a modernist. It wasn't that in the air at all. The world in the 1930s and 1940s had an air of going ahead. …

In the fifteen years until you get to 1947, there was the development of young architects interested in modern because, being young, they wanted to be advanced. And there were the books of Le Corbusier. There wasn't much on Mies published, I don't think, but if it was, they were excited about it. Anything contemporary.

By 2025, the International Style and its unadorned inheritors have permeated every city and suburban strip mall in the living memory of all but our most elderly. So it may be hard to understand what it was like to encounter Modernism back when it was fresh and rare. When I imagine the sudden contrast of a single building made of sheet glass or smooth, white stucco emerging — for the first time — against a backdrop of carved stone and intricate terra cotta friezes, I become more sympathetic toward architects’ excitement for what Hughes (and Ian Dunlop before him) dubbed The Shock of the New. Had I been alive in the 1930s, a decade that began with the World Fair celebrating “The World of Tomorrow,” might the blank walls have felt invigorating to me because they were unprecedented?

My sympathy for those experiencing the shock of the new curdles into skepticism when I listen to what Bunshaft had to say about encountering Le Corbusier's early buildings for the first time, when he travelled Europe as a young man. Upon visiting Corbu’s Swiss Pavilion and Salvation Army Building, he “didn't think much of either at that time":

We may have been in love with Le Corbusier, but we didn't really know what it was. All we knew was that it was simple and white and rectilinear and it had stilts. We were not really serious, because we hadn't built a building. We didn't know enough about it. …

We weren't impressed at all. I thought it was peculiar. … To me, at that time, I thought Le Corbusier was way out. The ground floor that opened on stilts was all right, but he had some photo murals or something that were, I thought, weird.

Moreover, Corbu's buildings were only about twenty years old when Bunshaft visited them, but they were already unlivable and falling apart:

We came to the Salvation Army Building, and it has one façade of the building which is about six or seven stories, all glass. I think it faces south. That didn't work. It was not air conditioned. It was just a furnace. They built a block wall about three feet back from this glass wall and put openings like ordinary windows in the block wall so that people would get light but they wouldn't get this radiating heat. So that, of course, destroyed the building. Then some of the horizontal metal coverings for the glass were hanging out in the air. They were falling off. It was the shabbiest goddamn thing you ever saw.

The smooth stucco that Le Corbusier used for his non-glass walls was fragile, lacking enough elasticity and weather-proofing to endure. Hughes explains that buildings like Corbu's Villa Savoye “ended up cracked, stained, crumbling, and otherwise ruined after a few years' exposure to the elements.” Though nearly demolished because of perennial problems like a recurring leaky roof, the villa has instead been repeatedly renovated.

Curiously, Bunshaft admired both Le Corbusier and the city of Paris, even though Corbu schemed to destroy the Parisian neighborhood that contains the stunning Place de la Madeleine and Opéra de Paris to make way for his tower blocks. Corbu exclaimed, “Imagine all this junk, which till now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a height of over 600 feet!” As Hughes noted about the “man who wanted to assassinate Paris":

That Corbusier could dismiss most of Paris' historical deposit as a dry crust of junk is the measure of his fervour, and one would be quite wrong to think he did not mean every syllable of the tirades he directed against the sentimental passéistes who, in the name of memory and variety, opposed his “vertical city… bathed in light and air.”

Yet Bunshaft, who reminisced about walking past the opera house that Corbu wanted to demolish, called Paris “without question the greatest city in the world. There's nothing even close — all thanks to Baron Haussmann.” When his interviewer asked how he reconciled loving Paris, and its ornate cathedrals, with his claims that Modern architecture was groundbreaking for being “direct and honest,” Bunshaft started waxing poetic:

There are only two or three things that I've ever seen that really I could feel shivers. One of them was Notre Dame. The first time I went in it was dark and it was everything that you imagine in a church. It was mysterious. It was brilliant. The rose windows in there are unbelievable when there are lights on them.

In contrast to his rare moment of architectural awe within Notre Dame — an exemplar of tradition, and an opposite of the International Style that he would later proliferate — Bunshaft was baffled and off put by Corbu’s early Modernist buildings. So why were he and his fellow MIT architecture students “in love with Le Corbusier"? What swept them off their feet before even making a pilgrimage to those shabbiest goddamn things they ever saw, and how can we explain this love affair between nascent Modernism and men with no garlic on their breath?

The answer is that they fell in love with drawings.

Notably, Bunshaft insists that he did not read Corbu's strange declarations — “a chair is in no way a work of art; a chair has no soul; it is a machine for sitting in" — but only flipped through the pages to look at his drawings. This prolific disciple from the second generation of Modern architects had no use for his mentor's ideology, or even his pioneering buildings — only his pictures. When his interviewer asks if he read Le Corbusier's Toward a New Architecture in school, Bunshaft replies:

I don't read books. I mean, I read a lot of novels and things, or biographies, but I very seldom read architectural books at all or art books. I look at the pictures or the drawings. …early Le Corbusier books in the late 1920s and early 1930s [were] the most exciting things. His style of drawing, his style of presenting was very contemporary. There was something — it was a new revelation. There was no discussion whether we should do this or carry on doing classical.

And it wasn't just Bunshaft, although he seemed most conscious of the true object of these American architects' love affair. Towards the end of his career, Bunshaft was giving out awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts to some painters at an annual ceremony in their New York auditorium. Tom Wolfe narrated his awkward pronouncement from the stage:

After disbursing the last of them, Bunshaft turned toward the audience and said:

“I suppose this is something you don't see every day, an architect handing out money to artists.”

The audience laughed faintly, acknowledging that a pleasantry had been attempted but not quite getting it.

“But, then, a lot of things have changed,” said Bunshaft. “We used to give prizes to architects for doing buildings. Now we give prizes to architects for drawing pictures.”

Then he sat down. Not a peep out of the audience. Only a few souls… had the faintest notion of what he meant. Bunshaft had made no mention of Graves, who was seated behind him on the stage, nor did he look his way. But Graves was the only architect who had received an award, and furthermore it was true: he had won the award for drawings. … Not for buildings, in any event. You could count Graves' built structures on one hand. …

But so what! In the new mental atmosphere, in modern architecture's Scholastic phase, Graves' career shone with unmistakable radiance. There was something sordid about doing a lot of buildings. …His watercolor renderings of his own unbuilt buildings were mauve, blue, swift, and terribly beautiful, like a storm. … One had only to say “Michael,” as his friends called him, and every aspiring architect on the circuit knew it was Michael Graves.

You couldn't say the same about Gordon Bunshaft — despite the scores of behemoth glass buildings he had designed or inspired. Within the university compounds you could say “Gordon" or even “Gordon Bunshaft,” and all you would get would be a look as heavily glazed as Lever House.

Such was the fate of a prolific early adopter of Corbu and Mies who, by his own admission, could not draw well. He brought up his inability so many times in the 10hr Oral History that his interviewer finally commented, “You know, you keep saying, ‘I can't draw, I couldn't draw’ …and yet everywhere you went, you were the designer. Can you explain the difference to me?” Bunshaft says that he couldn't draw “in the true sense, not real drawing" and that designing has nothing to do with draftsmanship.

As Hughes put it, “The most influential architecture of the twentieth century, in many ways, was paper architecture that never got off the drawing board.” For Hughes, paper architecture was “drawings influencing other drawings” and he supposed that it became so memetic because “the space of art is the ideal one of fiction. In it, things are not used and they never decay; one cannot walk in a painting, as one walks along a street or through a building. The paintings are incorruptible.” Memes hardly need truth to successfully propagate, and this architectural meme used drawing and painting to spread the deception that the International Style would look just as beautiful in real life. Alas, the Apocrypha was wrong to declare that “above all things Truth beareth away the victory.” Hughes cites Brasilia, a planned city erected in the 1950s for Brazil's new capital that was inspired by Corbu's designs, as a clear example of “a façade, a ceremonial slum of rusting metal, spalling concrete, and cracked stone veneers, put together on the cheap by contractors and bureaucrats on the take” that nevertheless “looked splendid in the drawings.”

Sheerbart’s passion for a glass world came true in part, as the International Style fulfilled its name by colonizing nearly every city in the world. (Paris is a notable exception.) But our glass curtains — seemingly innumerable as the stars above — failed to usher in utopia. That place only exists in drawings like Scheerbart's own, because the only location where buildings may remain pristine and pure is on paper.⁷

Drawings and paintings have the power to turn ugliness into beauty. They accomplish the equivalent of transmuting lead into gold — but where even Isaac Newton failed at alchemy, the gifted artist routinely works miracles. When Claude Monet painted his impression of a sunrise, he transformed the industrial haze obscuring the port of Le Havre into a dream. Francisco Goya made a series of stunning etches about abuse, corruption, and murder called “Los Caprichos (The Caprices)” — Hughes described Goya as making “eloquent and morally urgent art out of human disaster.” Consider how the only time you're happy to see flies land on fruit is within a still life.

It is no wonder, then, that drawings could make a temptation out of Corbu's austere buildings. Where ideology failed to catch on, and the shock of the new was dampened by shabbiness, the power of drawing won the hearts of budding American architects. What a terrible irony: the beauty of drawing became an accessory to the murder of ornamental architecture.

1. I stopped to pester the father of the bride, who confirmed that the groom loves the International Style. Alas, some women miss important red flags before making life-altering commitments.

2. As related by art critics like Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House and Sam Hall Kaplan in the Lost Angeles Times.

3. A lesser known Nazi crime was driving the pioneers of ugly architecture to America, where they killed Art Deco, our last and most original ornamental architectural tradition.

4. “Le Corbusier” does not have a direct English translation, and it has also been taken to mean “the little crow" or “the keeper of crows.”

5. Haussmann overhauled Paris between 1853 and 1870. Immediately afterward, Parisians endured what Viktor Hugo dubbed “l'année terrible” — the “terrible year” when France lost the Franco-Prussian War and then revolutionaries formed the Paris Commune to seize control of the city. As the official French Republic violently suppressed the Communard's socialist revolt, Paris starved and burned; despite this, Haussmann's architectural legacy survives today — to Corbu's chagrin.

6. Full disclosure: Eric is my husband, and a cornerstone of our marriage is railing against ugly architecture. I chose a better man than the aforementioned bride who was reduced to taking wedding photos in front of the Seagram Building.

7. Recall this passage from “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco'":

Unlike the Modernist buildings that always seem in need of a pressure wash, which sooner or later become fixtures of urban blight, ornamental architecture benefits from the patina of time. The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier captured this effect when he declared, “O Beauty, old yet ever new!” Age generates mystery, allusions to untold and forgotten stories from generations past. Or in the extreme, entropy and tragedy transform beautiful architecture into romantic ruins like Heidelberg Castle. Ornamental architecture is like an old growth forest.