Art: Contrast at Harvard

For some months an important architectural exhibition has been circulating among U. S. colleges. Under the auspices of The American Russian Institute and such distinguished U. S. architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, William Lescaze, Joseph Hudnut, the exhibition illustrates the immense field of Soviet architecture and city planning. Last week, in Robinson Hall of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, of which Joseph Hudnut is dean, the 47 panels of Soviet plans and photographs were standing a severe if mute criticism. Displayed in the centre of the hall were scale models of housing projects, factories and homes designed not by Russian architects but by Harvard students. By contrast with their clean functionalism, many of the recent Soviet buildings looked confused, bourgeois.

Impossible only a year ago, this contrast was the visible result of a year’s steady work by the new chairman of Harvard’s Department of Architecture, Bauhaus-Founder Walter Gropius (TIME, Feb. 8. 1937). Nobody would be less disposed than Herr Gropius to exaggerate the merit of his students’ free designs at the expense of buildings actually erected, cities actually built under varying conditions in the U. S. S. R. Roughhewn, meditative Architect Gropius, a continual smoker of 5¢ miniature cigars, has made himself popular at Harvard by teaching a practical esthetic. Resenting architectural “styles” whether ancient or modern, he has established a new basis for instruction on Bauhaus principles: a thorough knowledge of building materials, training in three-dimensional rather than “paper” thinking, actual work under a contractor.

When Gropius came to Harvard one long-standing gripe among architectural students was that the “faculty jury,” which judged all undergraduate designs, could not be as fair as the individual professor who set each class its problem. To this complaint Professor Gropius lent a sympathetic ear, changed the system. Another Gropius innovation was instruction in industrial design by Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian designer who is credited with having developed the first tubular chair. Now in prospect are workshops where Breuer pupils may learn at first-hand the uses of modern materials. But the most extraordinary proof of Architect Gropius’ success is a requirement soon to be adopted by the Harvard Architectural School: that no student can graduate unless he has had six months’ hard labor on a real construction job.