Art: Picture-Book Skyscraper

The slab-sided U.N. Secretariat building in Manhattan has caused more controversy than any other skyscraper in Manhattan’s jagged skyline. Distinguished architects like Richard Neutra have hailed it as a great architectural achievement. Other people have referred to it scornfully as “a sandwich on edge.” Last week Author-Critic Lewis Mumford, writing in The New Yorker, knocked it flat—on paper.

Wrote Mumford: “In this building, the movement that took shape in the mind of Le Corbusier in the early 1920s—and that sought to identify the vast and varied contents of modern architecture with its own arid mannerism—has reached a climax of formal purity and functional inadequacy. Whereas modern architecture began with the true precept that form follows function . . . this new office building is based on the theory that . . . function should be sacrificed to form . . .

“Paraded as pure engineering and applied geometry, this new skyscraper proves really to be a triumph of irrelevant romanticism. If anything deserves to be called picture-book architecture, this is it, for all the fundamental qualities of architecture seem to have been sacrificed to the external picture, or rather, to the more ephemeral passing image reflected on its surface. Should one look behind this magician’s mirror, one should not be surprised to find, if not a complete void, something less than good working quarters for a great world organization . . .

“What we have, then, is not a building expressive of the purposes of the United Nations, but an extremely fragile esthetic achievement, whose main lines conform to the ideals of a boom period of shaky finance and large-scale speculation . . . As a conscious symbol, the Secretariat adds up to zero; as an unconscious one, it is a negative quantity, since it symbolizes the worst practices of New York, not the best hopes of the United Nations.”