Art: The Circle & the T Square

From the Tower of Babel to the railroad roundhouse, men have always felt an almost romantic affection for circular buildings. Now, newly appreciated for form and function, round buildings are rising all over the U.S. and filling a variety of needs.

For Religion. Circular buildings are fitting for churches through their ability to focus worshipers’ attention on a central event. The newest and perhaps most striking round church in the U.S.. the Church of the Priory of St. Mary and St. Louis, was consecrated this month near St. Louis. Designed by Gyo Obata, with engineering consultation from Italy’s Pier Luigi Nervi, the church is a confection of thin concrete shells resembling nuns’ coifs. tiered like a giant pudding mold. On top of the graceful central lantern is the slenderest of crosses. Says Joseph Cardinal Ritter, Archbishop of St. Louis: “It is an outstanding demonstration of the ingenuity of man in honoring almighty God.”

Not a church but still devoted to purposes of religion is the new headquarters of the American Baptist Convention at Valley Forge. Pa., near Philadelphia. Here Architect Vincent G. Kling neatly resolved a problem that had been bothering the Baptists: they wanted a building to house five separate divisions of the church’s operation, yet one in which no division would be given preferential space. The doughnut-shaped structure they got houses each of the five divisions in harmonious wedges within. The Baptist Convention’s highly unconventional building, clearly visible near Interchange 24 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, has created a small headache for turnpike cops because of rubberneckers’ traffic slowdowns; inside the building another problem has arisen: a tendency on the part of office girls to get lost. But. says Director of the Division of Communications the Rev. R.

Dean Goodwin, “all they have to do is keep walking and they’ll come back to where they started.” Other notable round buildings for religion in the U.S.: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation near Milwaukee, Saarinen’s chapels at M.I.T. and Drake University, William Hidell’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Dallas.

For Medicine. An exemplary hospital-in-the-round is suburban Boston’s Brookline Hospital, finished in 1959 for $1,600,000. Architect Joseph L. Eldredge thinks that it cost 7% less than a rectangular one of the same area, partly because there is less outside wall area and partly because plumbing, heating, ventilation and electrical conduits can be better concentrated in a central core. Patients’ rooms are shaped like pie slices. Nurses like walking its circular corridors: “It’s a kind of optical illusion—we can’t see that long hallway stretching ahead.” No illusion: a nurse’s trip from service area to patient is only about 50 ft. as compared with an average of 90 ft. in standard hospital buildings. Another eye-catching round hospital: Charles Luckman’s Valley Presbyterian in Van Nuys, Calif.

For Business. One of the most light-hearted round buildings in the U.S. is a bank: the little Wells Fargo branch gracing the plaza of the glassy, curtain-walled Crown Zellerbach Building in San Francisco. Architect Peter Kitchell. design head of the bank for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, turns a deaf ear to critics who grump that the bank, with its fluted roof and carousel airiness, is wrong for its setting at the foot of the zooming Zellerbach tower. Says he: “The essence of our bank is its simple shape. The Wells Fargo people love it; the first manager there treated it better than his wife.” A unique marriage of roundness to function is the Pan American World Air ways terminal building at New York’s Idlewild airport. A roundhouse for the jet age, its giant umbrella roof can shelter eight airliners at once as they nuzzle up to take on passengers. It successfully does away with the greatest inconvenience of modern air travel: the wearisome warrens of corridors that stretch seemingly for miles out into the windy tundra. Other outstanding round commercial buildings: Henri Jova’s branch bank for the Trust Company of Georgia in Atlanta; Hollywood’s Capitol Records Tower, designed by Welton Becket & Associates.

For Housing. Nearing completion in Chicago is a double-barreled monument to circularity. Marina City, poking its twin towers 65 stories above the Chicago River north of the Loop, is the tallest apartment house ever built.

Marina City has its roots in a complex of lower, earthbound buildings—a theater, a restaurant, two dozen shops, a block-long office building, a bowling alley, and a marina for 700 private boats. The first 20 floors of each tower will be given over to spirals of garage space; rising above will be apartments and penthouses to house 896 families. With all its recreational and shopping features nestled conveniently at its base, it is a microcosm of a city and tenants can work, relax and shop without going off the reservation.

When Architect Bertrand Goldberg tried to explain this concept to his mother-in-law, she replied: “That’s simple. It’s what we used to call living above the store.” The reasons for round buildings are as varied as their purposes. In some, roundness has been dictated by a client who simply wants “something different”—and to this group belong the mushroom motels and “fun” private houses that punctuate the countryside. In others, site, utility and economics, as well as esthetics, are factors. Round buildings can be functional and beautiful, thrifty and structurally sound. As long as rectangular city blocks dictate the shape of building plots and therefore their most economical use, round buildings will have to be reserved for special architectural occasions. That these occasions arise once in a while in a world of plot-hogging glass and steel shoe boxes is reason enough to be grateful.