Art: Puddled Spire

Since Swiss-born Architect Le Corbusier uttered his famous dictum, “A house is a machine to live in,” his followers have outdone themselves in paring down structures to their bare bones. While their efforts, seen from the outside, have often produced some handsome glass-walled slabs, the effect on the inside has too often been that of a streamlined, air-conditioned nightmare. To counteract these trends, a handful of modern architects have moved back towards rough tex tures and hand-worked surfaces to get away from the “over-calipered look.”

Most recent example is Architect Eero Saarinen’s new cylindrical chapel for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (TIME, June 29, 1953), built of rough-textured brick and separated from the campus by a narrow moat. Meant to harmonize with the nearby brick dormitories, the nondenominational chapel presents a severe mask on its exterior; within, it is a citadel for repose and worship.

To top off its new chapel, M.I.T. last week raised a brand-new, 45-ft.-tall aluminum spire, the work of Sculptor-Welder Theodore Roszak (TIME, Aug. 15). So that the steeple, which looks like a cross between an attenuated lobster claw and a fragile bottle opener, would not appear machine-made, Sculptor-Welder Roszak produced something brand-new in surface ornaments: he carefully puddled ingots of aluminum into “contemporary amor-phic baroque” blobs, then welded them to the steeple’s base. Still to come: a bell for the steeple. What it will look like, M.I.T. refuses to say beyond the tantalizing hint: “Of course, it won’t look like a bell.”