End of the Glass Box?

For a while it seemed as if modern architecture, led by Chicago's Mies van der Rohe, had found the solution for the modern city: glass skin on steel skeletons combined functionalism and efficiency with esthetic discipline. But at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in Dallas, many members were in open revolt--and two buildings made headlines last week with an eloquence of their own to support the dissenters.

"We're sick of the glass box. For the last 30 years we have abandoned basic architectural precepts, such as light and shadow and depth and beauty," San Francisco's S. Robert Anshen told the architects. "When men lived in caves," said William W. Caudill of Houston, "they poked holes in them to let air in and smoke out. The holes got bigger and bigger. Now the holes have eaten up the box." Others added that the all-window building has created still unsolved problems of glare and temperature control.

So what might come next? Like a Mayan Temple. "I think we are going back to the solid mass," said Harold Spitznagel of Sioux Falls, S.D. "In New York you can see some evidence of this, and the recent Boston City Hall competition proves the point even more sharply. That building looks like a Mayan temple." The winner (out of 256 entries) in the Boston competition is as exotically daring as anything Boston has ever seen. Designed by Gerhard Kallman, Noel Mc-Kinnell and Edward F. Knowles, all of Columbia University, it combines traditional Boston brick with reinforced concrete, but the most striking thing about it is its use of ancient secrets to produce modern magic. It does indeed look something like a temple, neatly set within a plaza and punctuated by sloping terraces, sweeping public walks, and an endless play of light and shadow on a fac,ade so deliberately broken up that it ignores floor lines except at the top. "It has a beautiful scheme," said Architect Walter Gropius.

A 5,750-Ton Sculpture. At Idlewild, TWA showed off its even more sculptured new terminal, best of the buildings put up there in the course of remodeling the airport. Basically the design is four huge shells of reinforced concrete, two of them stretching out like the wings of a bird.

If the construction had consisted of nothing more than the molding of this 5,750-ton sculpture, the terminal would be a landmark; but the elegant sweep of the design by the late Eero Saarinen is carried all the way through.

Just as the exterior symbolized to Saarinen "the excitement of the trip," so the interior suggests the constant flow of human traffic. To Saarinen. form did not merely follow function--it was also meant to lift the spirit: "Architecture is not just to fulfill man's need for shelter, but also to fulfill man's belief in the nobility of his existence on earth."

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