Art: Atomic Architect

Who will design the atomic world—the technologist or the architect? As the world’s top atomic scientists headed home from Geneva, leaving heady hints of a new atomic age behind them, Swiss Architect Rudolf Steiger was ready with an answer.

“When mankind got electricity and steam,” says Steiger, “factories sprang up, and residential sections were thrown around them without planning. That’s what we must avoid in the atomic age. The architect should be Number One.”

Steiger, 54, a blunt bundle of energy, is Switzerland’s No. 1 architect. Last week he and his partner-son, Peter Steiger, were busy checking blueprints for a mammoth Steiger-designed atomic laboratory near Geneva. Commissioned by the twelve-nation European Council for Nuclear Research, the laboratory will cover 90 acres, will incorporate such new-age elements as a synchrocyclotron and a 25 billion electron-volt proton-synchrotron (TIME, Oct. 20, 1952).

Specialists’ Hash. Steiger is convinced that architecture has failed to keep pace with technological progress and, as a result, is sacrificing its supremacy in the world abuilding. His answer has been to learn more basic technology himself, and to plug for more emphasis on balanced technological training in architectural schools.

Building by committee, says Steiger, leads to an undistinguished hash. “Today, when something must be built, a building committee is formed. The committee calls in specialists to work out their incompetent ideas. There’s a specialist for concrete, a specialist for electrical engineering, a specialist for air conditioning, and finally what you might call a specialist for esthetics. That’s the architect. All he gets to do is present the board with six or seven fagade projects, and the worst is picked.”

Mixed Grill. Scorning the committee approach, Steiger designed everything down to the laundry truck for a recently completed, $20 million Zurich hospital. Every purchase order for the hospital, no matter how small, passed across his desk. When a surgeon objected to his unorthodox arrangement of the operating rooms, he said perhaps the doctor would be happier elsewhere. The doctor stayed, and eventually approved.

Before taking on his Geneva job, Steiger made a tour of U.S. atomic installations, found Brookhaven and Oak Ridge “like gold-miners’ settlements, because they were planned and built in stages, with no overall design.” The model of a Soviet atomic-power plant on exhibit at the atomic-energy conference in Geneva offended him even more: “It’s a mixed grill of Hellenic and Spartan styles.”

New Concepts. On his own Geneva atomic project, Steiger insisted on personal control of all details, called in experts to advise him on unfamiliar technological problems. His blueprints for the Geneva laboratory are uncompromisingly functional, yet harmonious. The steel and reinforced concrete buildings will be low, plain, widely spaced, and devoid of eyesores. Ruling out eyesores meant redesigning many installations. For example, physicists assumed that the control room for the synchrocyclotron should be perched atop the giant magnet; Steiger insisted that, for esthetic reasons, the controls should be in a shielded room on the ground floor, adjacent to the magnet. “There’s no reason,” he explains, “why modern technical requirements should degenerate architecture.”

When he completes his present job, Steiger will plunge into an even more challenging assignment: building Switzerland’s first “atomic city” in Zurich Canton. The project calls for a power-reactor plant surrounded by factories, and a complete town for the personnel. “If it works,” Steiger says briskly, “I hope it will show that the architect can have a big, responsible position in the atomic-age.”