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A look
back at the work of a school of architecture is more than a mere
retrospective. It is an intimate history, and in many ways, it offers us
profound insight into the path architecture has taken in the last 75
years. To follow the school's history is to go from a time when
architecture had a fertile language, one rife with metaphor and allusion,
through a time when that language was stripped bare and back again.
Today, the architecture that emanates from the University of Miami--from
students, alumni, and faculty--is once again an architecture of
composition, exposition and refinement. Three quarters of a century has
brought this school full circle.
Start with the original university,
itself. The drawings for the original University of Miami--done variously
by Denman Fink and Phineas Paist with Harold D. Stewart and Paul Chalfin
(who just a decade earlier had decorated Vizcaya) seem almost a chimerical
dream now, an unrealized fantasy. They show, in classical plan and bold,
even rapturous watercolors, a utopian center of learning, one where
students walked in beauty. The school's first slogan: "Keep the World
Coming to Florida."
That was
the 1920s, expansive and ebullient times in America, with an architecture
to match the spirit of the era. Nowhere was this more true than in Miami,
in all of Florida – at least for the first half of the decade before the
killer hurricane of 1926 and the subsequent fallout of the real estate
market. In Palm Beach, Addison Mizner was redefining our idea of tropical
wealth with houses designed in his own particular
Spanish-Moorish-Italian-Venetian pastiche. In Opa-locka, Glenn Curtis was
making Scherezade’s wildly woven tales come alive in his dream-of-Araby
city. In Miami Springs, he was reinventing the Pueblo, another
architectural narrative rendered in stucco.
Of all
the themed towns, Coral Gables, birthplace of and home to the university,
is without a doubt the most interesting, the most important--a
full-fledged , near-utopian town of with a pastiche architecture intended
ultimately to look Spanish and conceived to be nearly
self-sufficient with manufacturing shops, groves and farmland, a
commercial center, public schools and a private university. It is, of
course, that university that we celebrate today.
It's
important to understand how much the ideas behind the University of Miami
and Coral Gables were inextricably intertwined from the beginning. From
the point of view of architecture, this is especially significant in that
the university was conceived of the same design traditions as the city.
One can cite numerous sources for the architecture of Coral Gables, from
Spain's Alhambra and Giralda to the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 19th
Century Germany. The sources are many and powerful.
Just as
powerful however, is the way in which the city was conceived--as a work of
art, as a picturesque composition, as a city in a garden, as a social and
civic entity--at once a work of pictorial prowess and great urbanism. And
that is where the University of Miami got its beginnings as well, as a
work of art set in a garden, and as part of a greater scheme for what
Coral Gables' founder George Merrick always called the City Beautiful.
Those
qualities, the inextricable linking of the romantic and the idealistic,
drove architecture in the 1920s, and though by the 1930s and 1940s, a
powerful fascination with the modern had taken grip of architecture, the
work still had that sense of wonderment, the joy of building that had
sustained previous eras. One only needs to assess Miami Beach's National
Register architectural district, generally called the Art Deco District,
to understand the pervasiveness of that romantic impulse.
The
decades immediately preceding World War II may have seen a shift in
style, a diminution of ornament in favor of streamlined geometry and
stripped down classicism, but the overreaching idea of what architecture
was for, what architecture could do to build a town or a city remained
unchanged. Indeed, in the years of the Depression, architecture was seen
to be the ultimate civic art, as the many wonderful projects of the Works
Progress Adminstration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) can
attest. In town-building, the utopian dreams of a Coral Gables yielded to
greater pragmatics. (Indeed, to keep the references local, the Miami Beach
Art Deco District was not built as part of a grand plan but
building-by-building; yet the overall coherence of a square mile of small-
and mid-scale hotels and apartment buildings shows an implicit acceptance
of certain unwritten civic rules, an belief in the greater good over
individual performance.
The 1950s
saw the beginnings of a move away from that, a move toward a private,
personal architecture that would devolve in many ways into a destructive
force. Yet the architecture of immediate postwar years--and here one can
begin to turn to the university and the School of Architecture for
examples once again--reflected a kind of optimism that was to fade
eventually. To see the Marion Manley/Robert Law Weed buildings that now
constitute the School of Architecture is to see a low-key fervor for
simplicity, for the elegance to be found in reduction to a common mean.
If today these buildings exist more as a reminder of a moment in time,
they remind us of that time when optimism had not yet yielded to
pragmatism, when architect was somehow still a quest to build better,
build appropriately.
In Miami,
one can see this still in the last remnants of the 1950s--scattered houses
designed to embrace the climate, luxuriate in the vegetation, make use of
both the new postwar technology and local materials. It's important to
note the sea-change here, in that the postwar residential architecture was
far more private-- pulled away from the city, the suburban landscape, the
street, and instead nestled in hammocks and trees; it was a kind of
near-rural architecture embedded in America's pioneer traditions, and it
yielded some extraordinary and fascinating works.
Interestingly, the concurrent movement in architecture--in Miami Beach
particularly but elsewhere in the country as well-- can be seen embodied
in such hotels as the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc and not dissimilarly,
in apartment buildings that were to follow; giant and sometimes grandiose
in posture (though ornamentally bereft), these buildings likewise pulled
away from the street and from their surroundings, yielding to the
ascendancy of the automobile at the cost of the streetscape, the
townscape, the greater good. The focus turned inward.
That
would devolve further, as cities across America were subjected to urban
renewal programs that supplanted an intricate urban fabric with
large-scale projects, often built for the noblest of purposes but lacking
the slightest notion of the long-term costs. We still grapple with the
legacy of this on a daily basis, and in city after city (including this
one), out-of-proportion and overscaled new development --even within the
framework and context of the urban neighborhood--continues without regard
for the greater civic good. One need not travel far from the University of
Miami campus to see this at work.
And yet,
in the confines of the classroom and in the ranks of the alumni, one sees
the alternative. There, once again, architecture has become a civic art.
Though the academic canon elsewhere still vaunts the inscrutable and
elevates the idea of the individual building, that is not the case at the
University of Miami. And that is worth noting and celebrating. Here,
architecture comes of a piece, with language that is resonant and rich,
and a powerful sense of context and obligation. In many ways, indeed, it
is full circle, but in others, it is a great sense beyond, as the ideas
that propelled the architecture for so many decades, so many centuries,
are being examined, codified, understood and restored in a way that
advances the art, the craft and the profession. It makes this 75th
anniversary truly one to take note of, and to commemorate. |
