Wheaton's Theatre

Last week a competition for an art centre for Wheaton College gave some intimation of how many young U. S. architects now accept the credo of modernism. Of 252 designs submitted by 243 architects, all but a scant two dozen were modern in character, and the judges picked the work of two beginners. To the celebrated internationalists, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, they gave second prize.

The Wheaton College project has been called the most important competition in U. S. architecture since the world-wide competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922. No such soaring mass of steel and stone, as the 36-story Tribune Building, the College's proposed art centre is nevertheless a sizable, $500,000 building, requiring a theatre to seat 500, a small auditorium for lectures, an art library, workshops, lecture rooms, studios, galleries, soundproof practice rooms for the music department.

Wheaton College itself is a small, earnest institution for female education nestling in a wooded cluster in the village of Norton, Mass.; one of its 22 buildings dates from its founding in 1834. Jointly arranged by the Museum of Modern Art and ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, the competition carried a first prize of $400, several smaller prizes. But Wheaton agreed to hire the winner as architect of the art centre, pay him six per cent of the building's cost as his fee, advance him $1,000 which would be considered a cash award in case the art centre was not built. To make sure that some designs would be successful, Architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, William Lescaze, Richard Neutra, and the Detroit firm of Lyndon & Smith were invited, paid $400 for submitting their designs.

Among the 243 architects were two young Manhattan strugglers who entered the competition late, gave up hope of winning it early. One was big, placid, 31-year-old Richard Marsh Bennett. A month before the competition closed he teamed up with an old friend, short, nervous, 33-year-old Caleb Hornbostel, son of a celebrated Pittsburgh architect, Henry Hornbostel, designer of the Hell Gate Bridge. Physically unlike as partners in a musical comedy team, Hornbostel and Bennett nevertheless had much in common. They studied at the Beaux Arts together, returned to the U. S. at the low point of the Depression, picked up whatever work they could get in the days when 90% of U. S. architects were unemployed. Bennett designed store fronts, electric signs, posters; Hornbostel got a job with the CWA.

Caleb Hornbostel's father, who won more competitions than any U. S. architect of his day, told his son it was easy to win them: "All you do is put in more columns than anybody else." But there are no columns in the Wheaton art centre. What led the judges to decide on Hornbostel and Bennett was the simplicity of their design, one of the most compact in the competition; their understanding of financial, operating and teaching problems. The finished art centre will be fan-shaped, snuggling naturally to the contours of its location. Candidly dissatisfied with the appearance of the building, the judges picked Hornbostel and Bennett on the strength of their ground plan, contemplated many changes before the art centre is erected, but felt sure that architects who could successfully solve a major problem would have little trouble with minor ones.

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