TEN BUILDINGS THAT POINT THE FUTURE

From the mighty upward lunge of the fifty-four granite piers that support a new Manhattan office building to the severe angular concrete frame of a Philadelphia parking garage, the best new American building is surging toward an expression of power. The leading architects have broken their long preoccupation with the crystalline glint of glass suspended in delicate metal frames, fragile to the eye. Instead they are producing façades with immense heft and carry. The new strength marks almost a return to the exuberant America of the late nineteenth century, when architects such as H. H. Richardson, Daniel Burnham, and Stanford White were celebrating the big American industrial empires in massive building forms etched with intricate finishes.

To impart the new massive look, a very old material has been unearthed—stone, both natural and the man-made kind, reinforced concrete. For the Columbia Broadcasting System headquarters finished this year in Manhattan's sudden-growth section, the eight blocks of Sixth Avenue from Rockefeller Center to Central Park, the late architect Eero Saarinen's choice was somber Canadian granite. Louis I. Kahn used slate for the walls of his dormitory complex at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, and concrete in his research laboratory for the Salk Institute

for Biological Studies overlooking the Pacific near Los Angeles. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the Saarinen office picked travertine to sheathe much of the exterior of the Lincoln Center repository theatre and library, just finished in Manhattan. Around the entrancing National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez put walls of tezontle, a volcanic rock. Most of the new buildings are by no means without metal and glass, but the satiny perfection of industrial finish, often accompanied by monotony, is no longer popular.

If all this is new, however, the architects' names are not. The famous firms—Kahn, Pei, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and the Saarinen office, with Kevin Roche now dominating its designing—still produce the outstanding work. But a new group of American clients has begun to commission architecture of high quality. The corporations, once the most ambitious patrons, have been replaced by the universities. Four of the ten buildings shown on these pages were put up by institutions of higher education, and an even higher proportion of college buildings would have to be chosen by anyone trying to select the fifty best recent buildings in North America. The frantic postwar era of campus construction, when so many shoddy buildings went up, has given way to a confident architectural quest by the colleges.

174 FORTUNE December 1965

A logical pattern for industrial flow shaped the Sifto Salt Ltd. mill and warehouse in Goderich, Ontario, for architect John B. Parkin Associates. But a sculptor's hand assembled the utilitarian components, which include a structural steel frame set on poured-concrete foundations, brick and concrete walls up to the third-floor level, and ribbed concrete-asbestos siding above. The muscular building wears an incongruous, spidery sign on top. Cost, $885,000 or $13 per square foot.

In Mexico City the new National Museum of Anthropology by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez evokes the richness of its collection of historical artifacts. Above is Aztec Hall with the stone of the sun, a religious calendar. Below is the grand patio, roofed by an immense aluminum umbrella with a fountain spraying around its single support. Cost, $13,600,000.

Publisher Samuel I. Newhouse has given Syracuse University $15 million for construction of a three-building center for research and education in mass communication. The center's first building, by architect I. M. Pei, is the School of Journalism, a concrete structure of grace and composure. It contains classrooms, lecture halls, offices, and, in the windowless podium on which the building rests, photographic studios. Cost, $2,870,000; $31 per square foot.

This great Philadelphia garage (left) resembles both bridge and fortress. Built by the University of Pennsylvania to store student and faculty cars for a half day or longer, it stacks 360 automobiles on nine column-free parking platforms connected by ramps. The structure is poured-in-place reinforced concrete; the architects, Mitchell-Giurgola Associates; the cost of the garage, $759,000, or $2,100 per parking space.

FORTUNE December 1965

The administration building for the new University of Illinois cam-
pus in Chicago (left) is, in effect, three reinforced-concrete buildings,
placed atop one another. Six more stories would have been necessary
were it not for the overhanging upper floors. Architect, Walter
Netsch Jr., design partner of the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill. Construction cost, $8,030,000, or $27 per square foot.

The latest addition to New York's Lincoln Center is a strong, serene
building (below). It contains a repertory theatre and a library museum
of the performing arts behind the wide pool, which makes an island
of a piece of Henry Moore sculpture. Architects were the New York
office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and the office of Eero Saarinen.
Behind the glass wall is the theatre lobby, to the left the unfinished
opera house. Cost, $17,700,000.

Overlooking the Pacific in La Jolla, the first completed section of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (right) contains laboratories and offices in two buildings. The buildings are separated by a garden space, with irrigation canals now installed awaiting planting. The canal will drain into a large pool, with a fountain, at the lower right. Behind the slanted, finlike walls are private studies, with glass sides facing the ocean. The architect is Louis I. Kahn and the material is his favorite concrete, here exposed on the exterior as well as supporting the interior. Construction cost of the laboratory buildings, $11,415,000; about $30 per square foot.

FORTUNE December 1965