"Any Form You Need"

In 1957, on a low Connecticut hilltop five miles northwest of Hartford, there rose an office building of such beauty that the American Institute of Architects labeled it one of the "Ten Buildings in America's future." Made of steel, glass and aluminum, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. head quarters combined the taut discipline of Mies van der Robe's masterpieces with grace notes--inner courtyards, reflecting pools, broad promenades--as old as the most ancient palaces. Now, perhaps to their dismay, the officers and employees of Connecticut General can look out their windows and see on a neighboring knoll a new building that tops theirs in grace and drama.

Both were designed by the ebullient Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Manhattan office. The new building is headquarters for the Emhart Manufacturing Co., which develops and produces machinery for making glass containers. Though in no sense decorated with extraneous embellishments, the building has a warm freedom about it that is almost impossible to achieve in even the best steel and glass boxes. The reason is that the structure is of prestressed concrete. "Steel is prefabricated in rectilinear units, and you have to work with that," says Bunshaft. "With concrete, you have to make your own forms and you can make any form you need." Duck Soup. When Emhart first commissioned SOM, the firm turned out sketches of two-and three-story buildings resting on the ground that seemed uninspired and esthetically wrong. Then Bunshaft did a doodle of a slim rectangle hovering over a curved line, and from this the design began to crystallize. He called in Structural Engineer Paul Weidlinger "to talk over how to hold the building together." Suddenly, adds Bunshaft, mixing up his metaphors along with his concrete, "the whole thing began to fall together like duck soup."

The columns upon which the one-story slab rests are treelike supports, prestressed and poured in position--first the cross-shaped trunks, then the great branches. With this sturdy but graceful forest as a foundation, the thin slab seems so light that it appears barely to touch the top branches at all. Its cantilevered edges defy gravity, its corners almost soar into space.

Luxurious Elegance. Cars park in the concrete forest, eliminating the need for an outside parking lot that can disfigure any building. The slab itself has two rectangular holes cut into it, one for beauty, the other for function. The first creates a courtyard that gives the feeling of luxurious elegance. The second surrounds a two-story steel and concrete laboratory, which, aside from connecting doors, is structurally not a part of the slab. It rests on the ground--a building within a building, so subtly encased that it in no way intrudes on the overall design.

From the start, Emhart made it clear that it was a down-to-earth engineering outfit and that it wanted no decorative frills. The resulting interior could have been as cut up and antiseptic as a hospital had not the great floor been left as open as possible. The only permanent walls are the ones that surround the lab and mechanical facilities. The band of glass that surrounds the slab is set back three feet from the light columns that support the flat roof. The setback not only gives protection from the sun, but brings the interior and exterior of the building together. No employee can look out a window and, seeing the columns, forget the outer rhythm of the building as a whole.

Concrete has turned out to be not only freer and more economical, but also strong enough for skyscrapers (e.g., Manhattan's new 50-story Americana Hotel). It can have the brutal, handmade look of Le Corbusier's sculptural architecture, or it can be as precise as steel itself. European architects, lacking the abundant structural steel that has largely shaped U.S. architecture, have long utilized concrete's versatility. The Emhart building is a triumphant U.S. example of how concrete can add new dimensions to architecture without destroying the discipline and purity that were the virtues of the glass box.

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