PROFILES ARCHITECT YOU'RE LUCKY IF YOU CAN COME CLOSE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01676R004100060048-1
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• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 26
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 2, 2002
• Sequence Number: 48
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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T.:PROFILES
ARCHITECT
1--YOU'RE LUCKY IF YOU CAN COME CLOSE
IN July, 1926, the League of Na-
tions, having decided to build itself
a palace in Geneva, invited all the
architects in the countries constituting
its far-flung membership to submit de-
signs for such a structure, in a competi-
tion to be judged by an international
committee of experts in the field. By
January, 1927, when the competition
closed, three hundred and seventy-seven
architects had submitted some ten thou-
sand designs. l'he judges then held a
series of meetings in an attempt to come
to a unanimous agreement on the best
plan. During their first sixty-four ses-
sions, they were unable to reach a de-
cision, although a plan submitted by
Charles Le Corbusier, the French func-
tionalist, regularly received more votes
than any other. At the sixty-fifth ses-
sion, Le Corbusier's plan was disquali-
fied, on the technicality, perhaps polit-
ically inspired, that it had been drawn in
printer's ink, and not in China ink, as
the terms of the competition had stipu-
lated. Then the judges went on to pro-
claim nine architects (including, para-
doxically, Le Corbusier) co-winners of
the contest, confused things a little more
by announcing that none of their plans
would be used, and wound up by hand-
ing what had become a very hot pota-
to indeed to a committee of five sup-
posedly experienced diplomats, who
hardly lived up to their advance billing
by first selecting a team of experts to
advise them, then rejecting their ad-
vice, and, in the end, hand-picking four
architects, not including Le Corbusier,
to collaborate on an entirely new design
for the palace. The building, an anti-
septically conservative one that nobody
was happy about, was filially opened in
September, 1934?seven years after the
wrangle began. Since the League's dis-
piriting failure to get its own house in
order, to say nothing of the world's, is
still vivid in the minds of statesmen on
both sides of the Atlantic, a good many
of them feel that the most spectacular
feature of the permanent headquarters
of the United Nations, on the East Riv-
er, is that the members of its inter-
national board of design?seventeen
architects, from fifteen countries, among
diem two Russians, a Brazilian Com-
munist, and the controversial Le Cor-
busier?unanimously arrived at a plan
in four months and in a rare state of
harmony. The major credit for this
achievement is generally accorded to the
leadership of the American architect
Wallace Kirkman Harrison :is chair-
man of the hoard of design and direc-
tor of planning for the United Nations
headquarters. Under Harrison's direc-
tion, the three buildings that constitute
the headquarters were up and ready for
occupancy just four years and one
month after ground was broken for
the first of them. Their total cost ex-
ceeded by only two and a half million
dollars the original appropriation of six-
ty-five million?a considerable feat in
view of the fact that the price of budd-
ing materials rose about twenty per cent
during the period of construction.
A hearty, intense, strung-featured
New Englander of fifty-nine, who
stands a bulky six feet two, shambles like
a small-town mailman, and, whether he
is talking English, French, or Spanish,
still speaks in the undefiled accents of
Ins native Massachusetts, Harrison, up
until he achieved his recent celebrity as
the U.N.'s architect-in-chief, was large-
ly unknown outiide architectural cir-
cles, although over the past quarter of
a century he has been a partner in firms
that have built some seven hundred
million dollars' worth of assorted struc-
tures. Among these are all but one of
the fifteen components of Rockefeller
Center; the Try Ion and Perisphere at
the New York World's Fair, in Hush-
ing Meadow; the limiter College build-
ing on Park Avenue; the African Habi-
tat, at the New York Zoological Park;
additions to the Bush Building, in Lon-
don; submarine and air bases for the
United States Navy, at Coco Solo, in the
Canal Zone; the remodelled Lenthj?ric
store, (um Fifth Avenue; a batch of ga-
rages for New York City's Department
of Sanitation; the Hotel Avila, in Cara-
cas; the Eastchester housing develop-
ment, in the Bronx; Oberlin College's
auditorium; the Republic National Bank
Building, in Dallas; the United Status
embassies in Havana and Rio de Janeiro;
and two office buildings that went up not
long ago in Pittshurgh?onc, thirty-
nine stories high, for the NIellon Bank
and the United States Steel ('orpora-
tion, and the other, thirty stories high,
for the Aluminum Company of Amer-
ica.
Much in the pattern of those recur-
rent NIarquand characters who, though
11 'al C' I larii.,-()11
less constantly fretful about 11t lirivinrr
eilmiji HI- it, II al'IM,(111 5 k-archil When-
ever he is singled out for admiration as
the fellow who built the If.N. to call
attention to at least a dozen of the sp..-
ei:th!..ts who were associated Nvith him on
the project, hut ;It the same time he
insists on accepting lull responsihiliti
whenever the huildin!rs are (-rider/ed.
And there has been plenty of criticism,
for no other cont.. in p ri r a Fe hock-my:11
enterprise has provoked such exti eine
differences of opinion as the I ned
Nations headquarters.,2-,rmip the Sec-
retariat Building-, the Conterence
and the General Assembly Build-
ing-. Those in Li'. ii have called the most
prominent building in the group the
slab-shaped Secretariat-- --"a masterly
example of the power of architecture to
express monumentalit? " and "a triumph
of unadorned prt,portion," and one of
them has referred to the group as a whole
as nothing- less than "a segment if man's
dreains made visible.'' Those opposed
have been equally eloquent. They have
denounced the Se(a-etarit is, tinono
other things, "a sandwich on end,-
sinister emblem tit world power," :mil
"a bop-sized TV screen that no tine can
dig," and die entire setup as "a co-
lossal botch," "a spiritual cipher," and
"a collection of clicht's 'from the dead
past and the dead present." Ifarrison
has managed to parry most of these
thrusts gracefully, but in the case of a
prolonged attack by Lewis Alumford,
a criti,? for whom he has great respect,
he has periodically shown signs of feel-
ing the oing. Even so, he has man-
aged to keep his equanimity. Shortly
after Mumford publicly declared that
saturated with integrity, are neverthe- if the United Nations succeeded in be-
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".1 f re'd ! II" kw ha pp(71,',1 10
?
coining an (.11.(..ctive org-anization for
orld ,gov(rnment, it would 14.ti `,1)1ft
ot, and not because of, the architecture
of its permanent headquarters, the edi-
toi of the Su rid:1y Timis book-review
it:, lion sent I larrison a pre-publication
4. op\ of it book edited h Alinntord,
"Root, of C(intemporary American
, hitecture," along with a letter ask-
ing him if he would carE. It revieNv it.
lai 11..on's secretarN. of mail% cars'
st.tltiiIlti, \1 rs. iiurnadette de,
put t hesu (in his desk, mid in+, it note of
her oNvii :It the foot of the letter: "Ev-
er\ thing comes to him who waits."
I larrison's first ittiptilse was to send
the book hack for somebody else to re-
View, because he was afraid that he
(..ould not he objective about it, but he
?
clian:Eed iii,. rnind when he r( ad it that
night, ;111E1 the next morning, pacing his
it 11i like an :Ing,r\ moose, he dictated
a long, slashitn! diatribe. NIrs. ()"loole
read it back to him. "( ).1c., 1 larrisoll
said crisp1N. "That's pertuct. NoNv 1(..ar
it up." lii then sat down and dictated
it lather generous review.
Nprotession studded with gaudily
inde,taan nanin? annans, I a ria.,,n%,
hasic aim and stabilitl linn
(miaow, indn, id nality also In.lp to
explain his success. "In this NA ,Erld, N.oti
Call filld all thtt brilliant 111111(1ti MI ?Vallt,
but the ?VallyI IarritiollS 11c()-
P1c who are also cnntpletely reliable --
Ii a rare conlmndity," Beardsley.
R mill, a hi( ild of I larrison's iv lm is a
connoisseur oF cornmerce ratti-
er than of architecture, said
recentll "Nkrally can g.et along
Nvith peolde, a wide vat-id\
of people. For another thing,
he understands trione\. and
Itis a sense t tf responsihilit?
about it. ()11 top (if this, he's a
learheaded administrator, so
capahle that he yeas able to run
the ( )ffice ttl Inter-.1nterican
.11-fairs toward the end (if the
lit I.YI)ti Call WHI-k With
?Vally 1 Lirritioll.'' Ill the
Nuls()11 RuCketellel',
1:11-11sOil's ()111V
his independence. Har-
rison )ind Rockefeller, who
ha \c heen close friends tor ()vei-
1 wenty years, first met in the
enihr? time da Ns 1 RoE krfeller
I. enter, Avail which they were
oncerned as a I oung architect
and a Notidg still, respectivelN.
"The first time I 1)1.., ante
,(1 \':111v," 16H, keleller
has recalled, "was the day 1
Wr111 .11011g 111111 1'.11111(1- W111.11
lii 1111.-1 Vt ilh Olt: 5/V(.11
1%110 were designing the Cell-
to talk over how the ex-
terior (Et the R.C.A. ItitIihiiii
should he handled. Well, ra-
ther was accustomed to build-
Ings that had fluted columns or
( ;whit- arches marching up
their sides, and he. was out-
lining: his ideas on that sub-
jE.ct. The architects thi listened
till iii Father had finished, and
1)1(.11 1VallN. exploded. '(;(id-
dam it, .N1r. Rockefeller, Nam
can't (I() that!' he said. 'You'll
ruin the building if You cover
up its lines with that (.1:1551-
Hin,Eerbread.' lind
\VAIN WA': fill' V01111gUSf (11
.:11.1,111ft'CiS ;111(1 it W0111(1
1111V(? 11('(?11 VAS\ 10I" 111111 fl/ 1111Ve 11111VC(1
if SAC."
11.11'1,011\ 1-(1111f:If11111 ;IS 1 Mall Of
111C011.01411/1(' 111.111Ciplu f0VITI'S S1) higfi
that it tends to obscure his consider-
able reative powers. .As an architect,
he belongs to no school or move-
nient. "l'erluips you might call hint it
perpetual progressive," says Alax
Abrantovitz, his partner in the firrn of
Hari ison & Ahrainot it/. "The ques-
tion lArally is always asking himself
:111(1 cVei 1)(14 cisc is (where do we
goI 111111 ilith I ic's Avva s search-
ing tor .1 better design to express the
fun( non of .t building. Ile's always
on the I(Eokinit for new materials that
Avill make new designs practicable." 13y
w;11 of corroborating this statement,
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Abramovitz cites thc fact that the Secre-
tariat was the first building in the world
to have windows made of heat-resistant
glass; it started the present vogue for
exteriors that give the effect of being
a single huge window. Harrison is in-
clined to minimize the independent
streak that others see in him. "There's
no building that isn't designed hy tie
client," he says. "The amount of beau-
ty an architect can achieve is always
limited by the amount of imagination
and feeling for beauty the client has in
Ms system. Most clients haven't got
much, or else what they have is buried
deep beneath their conservative com-
mercial instincts. Here's the way it fig-
ures most of the time: In the designing
stage, when you're trying to interest the
client in a new idea, he thinks you're a
crackpot. Say it's a new kind of door.
The client won't touch it unless you can
take him over to some building that's
already up and show him a door exact-
ly like it. Then, when the client finally
gets into his own building and you've
given him the door he asked for and
nothing new he can boast about, you're
just a no-good, lousy carpenter." In
the case of the Aluminum Company of
America, however, I larrison & A brain-
ovitz had a client who was far from
reluctant about going along with them
on at least one phase of experimental de-
sign?an exploration of the various pos-
sible uses of aluminum ill construction?
and in consequence, the Alcoa Building,
in Pittsburgh, is undoubtedly one of
the most revolutionary office build-
ings of the past two decades; not on-
ly its ceilings, stairs, window frames,
air-conditioning equipment, lighting fix-
tures, piping, and hardware are made
of aluminum, but even its exterior walls.
According to the Alcoa people, it weighs
less than any other building of its size
in the world and may well be the most
weatherproof.
Along with his standing as an expert
on tall, trim, down-to-their-fighting-
weight office buildings, Harrison is also
prOminent in a field that at first might
seem to be an altogether antithetical
aspect of architecture. Over the past
quarter of a century, the firms he has
been associated with have led the way
in paying more than the custom:in lip
service to the view that architecture
should embrace painting and sculpture
as kindred arts. Calder, A rchipenko,
Gabo, ligel, Noguchi, Lachaise, Man-
ship, Ozenfant, Rivera, and Caller
are a few of the well-known painters
and sculptors Ilarrison has commis-
sioned to ornament his buildings. His
enthusiasm for modern art would ap-
pear to he simply a triumph of exposure
Lu) it for thirty-five 1, ars ago, when,
as a voting Yankee, i? ? found himself
in the wilderness is, he couldn't
see the stuff at all. s having over-
come his prejudice to die point where
he paints a preth made abstract
himself from time to time, and finds
a Calder mobile called "Snowfall" a
restful note in his bedroom, he is init
to convert others, and often sends mo-
biles and extremely modern paintings to
Midwestern businessmen he has had
dealings with, asking them to live with
the pieces for a while and see if they
don't find them as comfortable as an old
pair of flannels. A few years ago, in
a rather similar missionary mood, Ilar-
rison tucked a fine Picasso under his arm
and paid a call on Trygve Lie, then Sec-
retary-General of the United Nations,
to discuss the interior decoration of the
organization's new headquarters. After
a brief preamble in which he explained
how, to his mind, Picasso's work em-
bodied the aesthetic qualities the new
buildings should express, Harrison un-
covered fhe painting with a flourish
and stepped back to admire it. "lost
imagine," he said reverently. "Picasso
painted that in One day and thought
nothing of it!" "Neither do 1," Lie
responded shortly. There are no Picas-
5(15 at the U.N.
Harrison surrounds himself with con-
temporary art at home. Ile and his wife,
the former Ellen Hum Milton, have a
six-room, fifth-floor apartment on Vifth
Avenue, in the Sixties, which is so
tilled with modern paintings they have
bought, with copies of 1.A'gers painted
by Mrs. Harrison, and with Picassc.
that the Harrisons' friends have lent
them that it might almost be taken
for an uptown branch of the Museum
of Nlodern Art. Much as I larrisim ad-
mires this setting, however, he finds
that he can both enjoy himself and work
hetter at a lcar-niund country liouse he
(mins at Huntington, Long Island,
where most of the time he dresses in a
T-short and a soiled pair of to held
up by a rope belt. This house is forevCI-
l-eMiI'ldI1l:' visitors that it is the licie--
m.tker's son who wears sneakers, for it
is a seemingly aimle.s hodgepodge of
three buildilv:s, and, looking at it, one
finds it hard to believe that its owner
Ills desirned a dozen (0- more licautiiid
pH% :au houses tor other peOple. The
first id the three constituent buildings
oi the Huntington house to go up
rectangular one made of alumin thu
sheetiip4. Designed hi Roe 1iui ?r\ ,
II was the principal attraction at an
arclute( tural exhibition that was held
in Grand Central Palace in 1934; when
the exhibition was over, no one could
think what to do with the house, so
Harrison bought it, for fifteen hundred
dollars, and had it lugged to a sixteen-
acre piece of property he owned in
Huntington, where it was reassembled.
Dadaistic, if anything, in design, "the
tin house," as the Harrisons have always
called it, offers suCh conveniences as an
exposed drainpipe that runs down from
an upstairs bathroom into the center of
the living room, where it becomes one
of the legs of a built-in dining table and
then disappears into the floor. This
house proved to be icy in winter and
torrid in summer, and after struggling
along with it for a couple of years Har-
rison built on a four-room cottagelike
wing, made of Transite and wood,
which, while not very handsome, is at
least habitable. In 1939, he added "the
new living room"- -a vast, modern,
circular thing, thirty feet in diameter
and fifteen feet high, with white ce-
ment-hlock walls, on which Mrs. Har-
rison has painted a mural copied from
a design by Lc...ger. While this triple-
scoop concoction occasionally shakes the
faith of prospective clients the first time
they see it, it is home to Harrison, and
sooner or later they learn to put up
with it.
Compared to Frank Lloyd Wright,
Le Corhusier, and several of us other
prominent fellow-architects, who have a
penchant for Olympian comment on all
topics and a weakness for turning any
ICite-...1-Cite into a filibuster, I larrison is a
quiet man. In his ovvn way, though, he
can be fairly eloquent. Preoccupied with
the realitation that most people never
achieve all they aspire to, he has a way
Ill thinking and talking about the aver-
age man in sympathetic diminutives- -
s(unetimes as "the little fellow next
door," sometimes as "the hard-pressed
little bastard," but usually as just "the
little gus. t These expressions, as 1 lar-
rison uses them, convey a fueling quite
the opposite of that other ss mpathetic
diminutive, "the little man," as it was
used so patroffizattgly a few years back.)
When the little guy gets on I larrison's
Ill ind, it is hard to get him off. One
morning not long ago, he was kicking
anitind the philosophy of his pnitession
with a \ (HU rch acCt Oral !, radii:it(' of
1 ht'iilt School of Eine Arts, who had
come to see him at his office, in the
International Building, in Rockefeller
Center, W 11(.11 he received an urgent all
from Abrionovitz. Excusing himsch,
1liirison joined his partner In a confer-
en, C noni, W 11C rl' two WI II -10'd (Mt
sohui Ii'. 01, III tile windliratang for
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a'new building their firm is designing?
the Socony-Vacuum Building, which is
to cover the entire block bounded by
Third and Lexington Avenues and
Forty-first and Forty-second Streets.
Harrison returned to his visitor some
twenty minutes later. "And that's the
C rux of it," he said immediately, speak-
ing as offhandedly as if he had never
left the office. "Should the temple be on
the hill, or should you walk down to it F
All through history, man has put most
of his public buildings up on the hill, to
give' them an air of size and scope. It can
It' dangerous. Most of the time, the
building takes on an impersonal feeling.
The little guy goes up the hill to it less
and less frequently, and after a while he
has no connection with it at all. The
building" becomes an inanimate symbol
of authority. All right, we know that's
lou.4, so we'll build the temple in the
market place. But is it going to have the
dignity down there that the little guy
wants it to have After all, he vyants
something he earl look up to and put his
faith in. It's quite :1 problem. 'Where the
hell do we build it
Conf rowed in some of the less meta-
physical aspects of his profession, I larri-
son often grows equally concerned.
"Each time Volt Set Olit 011 a new build-
ing, you try to make it as nearly perfect
as possible," be said one day last spring
to a group of friends with win iii he Was
having an after-work drink in a bar near
his office. "You know it won't be per-
fect. You're lucky il you can come close.
I think mayhe we did come close with
Itoekefeller Center. Some of its build-
ings are twenty years old now, hut they
have every major facility the newest
buildings have except air-conditioning,
which is something ito tone knew much
ahout WhC11 14'C thC111. Ill :111V
cVc111, on iiuckeour mistakes and You
try to profit from them the next time. I
remember %chef) my wife :111(1 I were in
It OI a few summers ago, looking at
ryerything h? lichelangelo that we
(otild inn!, and we came on his Piet.'1.'
It's a really had piece of sculpture, no
two ways about it. Stack it up alongside
the 'David' or some of his things in the
Sistine Chapel, and it has no mt?aning,
giits at all, lecl hide better
when oil discover that even the greatest
artist in history could biuch joh nov,
and then." Harrison took his hall-point
dravyin pen rom his pocket and
reached for ;I ILIper 11:11)k "I think it
I elps to work in .1 111c Wc111
(100(11111g geometric shapes on 111c
11:II/kill, 50111c1hillg :11mllt this,
C011101-1' 111:11 111:11.:cs nu realize you can't
build :t perfect ((111(1 lug; you'd get
laughed at if you thought you could.
'This country has a priceless quality we
only half recognize. Americans are al-
ways trying to do something new, but
with a sense of balance. 1Ve're sort of
a halfway post between radicalism and
reaction. And we work hard. You go
at your joh and you know you're bound
to make your quota ,of errors, and you'
also know that if by any chance you
happen to produce something that's
pretty damn good, it's ordt because You
kept working at it. But that's always
burn the stun . The great men always
worked their heads off. IA, Bach, with
all those kids, who had to compose an
(oratorio every Sunday for Inc church.
lu 1101 d0W11 itiol ',aid, feel like
composing something inspired today.'
Ile didn't 11:110 the time to think wheth-
er 01' not 11C Was improvising 011 thCIIIC
by Palestrina, or what hr 11:15 trying to
do. It wasn't all pure, but on his good
days it was something wonderful he was
doing." I larrison turned the napkin over
and attacked the clean side. "Vl'hatever
von do, you can't stand still. My father
W:1S 1 11C11 !_r_ood guy. Wit he-
CalISC 110 thought everything was per-
fect 1Vorcester, the Elks, the foundrv
that he wlorked in and that was set up
along the old lines, as if the workers
wen. craftsmen. I saw it as a kid. And
I saw hull rolled over by the modern
factory. No matter what the cost is,
uti've to move fm-ward:'
H.Ilt.R 1,0N 55.05 1101.11 111 Worcester in
I STS, the only child of .fames and
lachel Kirkman Ilan-ism). The Harri-
son and Kirkimon families both origi-
nated in Yorkshire. 'File Kirkmans had
been engravers as far back as anyone
knew; they took the English industrial
revolution in their stride by engrav-
ing the rollcrs that sr:In-yeti prints on
the cotton ntanti facture(' in the
.1-ork,hire and Lancashire.
'Elie 1 1:11.1.i-i 11:111 10110Wi'd
_1:1111c5 1:11.11s,011 St:01C11 Is :1
1110111C1. 111 :1 iron foundry
and rose to ht su.perintendent of Rico &
13:irtun & I ilI, i coinhnLition ImIndry
and imicinn,? shop. Young: 11:11-1-ik,on
glow "I' 'It " tune 51111.11 tiff' "f
the classic T American boy-
hood had not let quite vanished from
the fringes of Eastern cities. " There
cci Ill cd In1,V0FCC5tt...1%, 1(011 001111111t ICH
"
the 51(0(1', 1 0111 11C111?, / I :11-11,:011
11P. 1 CC:11Ictl. "It W:1S a illIC 111C. \Arc
1001cti -.11?01111(1 cV1,11all thc 111 thcil-
\ VC 1111110 '-4','i',oioit t uld hueket'
sticks. In tin slimmers, wt. s111-.1111, :11Id
fisinIl101" oR kcrcl and pet (-11 in toes
Pond." \ lien Harrison sen fourteen,
his mother died unexpectedly. "I just
can't describe what a blow that was to
my father and me," Harrison says. "I
know' I lived with my father for a while
atter that, but whether it was three
months or a year,.I really have no idea.
guess you would say I was in a state
of prolonged shock. All I knew was
that I had to do something and do it
quick. I was a freshman in high school
at the time, and I decided the best thing
to (I() would be to leave school and get
a job. A friend of my family's knew a
Coil tractor it 0. W. Norcross,
who had an opening for an office boy,
at five dollars a week. 'Flutes how I got
into architecture --I needed work.
After a While, 111V father left Worcester
and started nuiving fr(nn jo)b to job, so
I went to room with the head office
bot --a chap named /tarry Ntrinchester.
Ilarry and I would get up at six-thirty,
rush to eat breakfast, rush to see who
could get to the office first?push, hus-
tle, and compete all day. Then we'd
rush home and stick our feet up on the
stove and see who could get the most
(out i if h(OlkS, With I fairy always a step
ahead of me." .1fter I larrison had been
with Norcross for two years, his salary
was raised to nine dollars a week, and
around that time he also got his first
art !inert oral training-, when he was as-
signed to draw some diagrams that
would indicate to a stonecutter the size
and shape of the stones he should supply
for an architrave the molded frame
around a door 01' 111'111110W, VOW' years
Attu starting work, I larrison left Nor-
cross to join the Worcester architectural
firm of Frost & Chamberlain as a junior
omit '.11101, While there, he enrolled
. for a series of night course's in structural
:engineering at Wrre, stet- Polytechnic
Institute, (14-ged ill by a restlessness
that found its (objective when an MI-
posing modern office building designed
ill' 0 ''.0 '.5' York firm went up on the
eolg (of Worcester Common. "It was
that !nodding that made it plain t(o tilt'
xvh( le I wanted to lot' with the people
who did that sort of work," Harrison
"1.1'hen I switched from Norcross
1. lost & Chamberlain, I thought I'd
find ,flit 111c lc:1,01r, thongs NVCre dune
1V:11 thcV IV)
i((il 0111l to-Il Mc sv h1 al had
to he one-sixth the NAlilth HI the opening.
lli,oi is 111r I% :IV arch;tra yes were
11000 , the looked k?st th.(t wa\ that
1)1C1 t And Wile()
:14:cd at Frost &. Chamberlain how the
proportions ot in iI'( hitrave had In-ell
1111/Ictl, thc1'ol1(11 me that thus,
th, proportkons prest rihed by 1.lc-
110110 iu LV son? book on architectural
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NOVEMBER. ?0, 1954
standards. That didn't satisfy me,
either. Surely, I figured, there were
better reasons for doing or not doing a
thing a certain way."
In the summer of 1916, when Har-
rison was twenty and had saved up
thirty-five dollars, he came to New
York and moved into a rooming house
on West Twenty-third Street. Un-
encumbered by letters of introduction,
he walked into the offices of McKim,
Mead & White, the most famous archi-
tectural firm in the country at the time,
and succeeded in getting an interview
with its chief designer, William Mitchell
Kendall. "Kendall told me there were
no openings for draftsmen," Harrison
says. "So I asked him if he'd let me
work for nothing. That's youth for
you?I had only about twenty dollars
left in my pocket. Anyhow, Kendall
told me to come back in a day or two,
and when I did, he put me to work
helping a man get up a book of draw-
ings of hospitals. A couple of weeks
later, they hired me at twenty a week."
Since American schools of architec-
ture at that time were rather rickety
institutions, Harrison, on the advice of
some of his associates at McKim, Mead
& White, began attending an atelier for
architects directed by Harvey Wiley
Corbett. There were three ateliers in
New York in those clays; one of the
others was directed by Frederic C.
Hirons and the third was conducted as
an adjunct of the Columbia University
School of Architecture. These ateliers
had been established about twenty years
earlier by a number of American archi-
tects who had imported the idea from
Paris after studying there at the Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts,
which since the seventeenth century had
been acknowledged to be the world
center of architectural thought. The
first Parisian ateliers were set up by
groups of wealthy students who disliked
the idea of attending lectures with the
rank and file at inconvenient hours,
and, instead, hired a loft and paid some
winner of the Beaux-Arts' Grand Prix
to serve as their maitre. Over the years,
atelier life became severely disciplined
and developed an atmosphere about as
gay as that at an Officer Candidate
School, and the same came to be true
of the ateliers in New York. The mem-
bership cowisted of the nouveaux and
the anciens, the latter being upperclass-
men who had been in the atelier two
years or more and were supposed to be
already partially endowed with the
wisdom of the maitre. Assisting the
maitre was the massier?an upperclass-
Rime four hundred miles north
man elected by his fellow-anciens?
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who had dictatorial powers over the
nouveaux, and submitted them to the
sort of hazing that is common to student
life everywhere. Meanwhile, everyone
would collaborate feverishly on some
architectural riojct?the plans and
specifications for a Loire clCiteau, per-
haps, or for a railroad station. Whatever
the limitations of this inbred system may
have been, atelier life encouraged a har-
dy esprit de corps, it gave the members
lasting lessons in architectural design,
and, transplanted to this country, it pro-
vided students with a much better work-
ing background than they could hope
to pick up at any of the domestic schools.
Upon enrolling as a no/41watt in
Corbett's atelier, Harrison found him-
self the slave of a gruelling schedule.
He would finish work at McKim's at
fivie, grab a bite to cat at a quick-lunch
counter, and show up by five-thirty at
the atelier, which was on West Thirty-
sixth Street, on the fourth floor of the
building occupied by Keen's Chop
I louse. There he would spend three or
four hours at his drawing board, along
with the other students, who were either
graduates of architectural schools or,
like him, draftsmen intent on develop-
ing their skill. Corbett, a lean, talkative
Californian, preached the doctrine that
architecture must have thrill and appeal,
hut as he made his way from drawing
board to drawing board, criticizing the
work of the students, he emphasized that
it must also provide space and conveni-
ence. "Ile was the first person to give
me the answers I'd been looking for,"
Harrison says. "He taught us the why
of things, and if there wasn't any good
reason for things being as tradition ruled
they should be, he said so. You couldn't
get that kind of answer at McKim's.
McKim, Mead & White were the
best?and the end?of the Renaissance.
The firm stopped there. In McKim
buildings like the Morgan Library and
the University Club, you get the Ital-
ians' richness of surface and their modi-
fications of the Greek proportions. That
was what McKim's style was, really?
a catalogue of the strong points of the
great Renaissance Italians. Say you
were designing a private building and
were going to provide it with an elabo-
rate hedge of trees, shrubbery, and flow-
ers. At McKim's, you would always
be referred to the hedges Lippi did for
, the Villa Medici. It was taken for
granted that Lippi's dimensions were time
best dimensions for hedges. Corbett's
approach was different. I used to walk
home from the atelier with him, and
he'd spout away on the good and bad
aspects of the buildings we passed. He'd
point to the columns McKim's did
for Penn Station, for instance, and ex-
plain that the firm had narrowed the
? spaces between them at each end of the
building to give it the illusion of sturdi-
ness. But Corbett thought it was carry-
ing the Renaissance much too far to
make taxicabs swerve between pillars to
get in and out of the station. Other eve-
nings, we'd walk over to Grand Cen-.
tral, and Corbett would point out why
he thought its plan was superior to Penn
Station's. Whitney Warren, the archi-
tect of Grand Central, provided more
entrances, of course, and placed them
in such a way that traffic moves in and
out of the station more easily."
Harrison had been following this
tight routine for about three months
when, at the suggestion of his minister
in 'Worcester, an old friend with whom
ihe had kept up a correspondence, he
moved from his Twenty-third Street
;rooming house to the parish house of
ithe Calvary Episcopal Church, then at
104 East Twenty-second Street. He
found the change much to his liking.
"The young curates were a great bunch,
full of pep and interested in everything,"
he says. "There was lively talk at every
meal. Living there made me realize
that there were other kinds of riches
besides those of my monastical archi-
tectural world."
THE United States was drawing
near to war. As a young man of
military age, Harrison signed up for a
weekly class in navigation at Columbia
and became a member of the Naval
Coastal Defense Reserve. His turn came
in rtily, 1917, when he was called to
active duty as a quartermaster second
class. Soon afterward, he was com-
missioned an ensign and assigned to
Submarine Chaser-80 as second-in-
command to Lieutenant Walter Blu-
menthal, a member of the New York
banking family, who was then two years
out of Yale. A wooden ship, a hundred
and ten feet long, with a fifteen-foot
beam, and capable of ten knots (assum-
ing there was a stiff following wind),
the SC-80 astounded its two young offi-
cers by crossing time Atlantic without se-
rious mishap and was then assigned to
the Otranto Barrage. This was the
name given to an operation in which
thirty-six American, French, and Eng-
lish vessels, most of them no speedier
than time SC-SO, patrolled time Strait of
Otranto, a forty-five-mile strip between
Cape Linguetta, in Albania, and the tip
of the heel of Italy, in an effort to pre-
vent Austrian submarines based at
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YORKER
hreaking out of the Adriatic into the
Mediterranean. The flotilla put On
surprisingly good show, sinking two subs
for sure and scoring- thirteen probables,
and in the end further distinguished it-
self by intercepting on its radio the Aus-
trian plea for an armistice. 'lite SC-80
was thereupon ordered to proceed to
Cattaro, on the Dalmatian coast, where
its two officers were empowered to act
as the American representatives at the
armistice talks until more experienced
men could be summoned to take over.
Blumenthal anti Harrison lived high off
the kebab during the two months they
spent in Cattaro, and Harrison found
the assignment so pleasant that although
he doesn't ordinarily care for souvenirs,
he still keeps a square of blue, white,
and red striped oilcloth that was part
of one of the earliest flags of the nation
of Yugoslavia, which was born at the
armistice conference.
In February, thanks to the limita-
tions of the SC-80, I larrison got his first
glimpse of Paris. United States Naval
Ifeadquarters for the Mediterranean, at
Malta, feared that the wintry Atlantic
would be too much for the pint-sized
suhchaser, and ordered the ship to wait
until spring before attempting the home
crossing. While hibernating, the SC-80
put into Marseille for a week, which
enabled Harrison to go up to Paris on
a four-day leave. He spent most of his
time there studying the workings of the
Beaux-Arts, and returned to his ship
determined to become a student at the
school as soon as possible. "I could see
that it was absolutely necessary for me
to go there for an education," Harrison
says. "For the first time in my life, I
wasn't broke. I'd saved up over a thou-
sand dollars in the Navy. 'clic only catch
would be getting into the Beaux-Arts.
The admission exam has always been
pretty brutal. In my day, it lasted twelve
hours, and you had to make a grade of
seventy to pass. Most of the candidates
spent six months in a preparatory atelier
before they took the exam. Apparently,
the object of the school was to see not
how many students it could get but how
few."
?Vith the coining of spring, the SC-
80 crawled back across the Atlantic, and
on July 19, 1919, Harrison was do-
charged. For the next couple of months,
he bolstered his Navy savings by work-
ing at McKim's, and attended some
mathematics classes at Columbia in
preparation for the Beaux-Arts exami-
nation. In October, he went to Paris,
took the examination, passed it com-
fortably, found himself a cheap room
on the Rue Jacob and a cheap restau-
rant le luiuiiiIg in bean s,itip, and set-
tled down to a t ear of study in an atelier
presided over by Gustave Umhden-
stock. "Boy, we were serious about our
opinions ill those days!'' If arrison sacs.
"I remember getting all strained up at
a cab' one night and breaking im glass
of wine a
I slammed it (IOWA] On the
OW to drive home some point I %A. as
making about closet space. I was sort
of a traditionalist in those dait s. I.ven
such a moderate innovation as using
large glass windows on the ground
floor of a building made 110 sense to me,
hecause it gave me the feeling the budd-
ing didn't have sufficient support. I
gradually learned to appreciate what the
revolutionaries like N lies van der Rohe,
(;ropius, and Le Corbusier were getting
at, and, of course, they were right about
many important matters, including some
of their t riticisms of the lteaux-Arts.
ymi can overrefine and oversystematize
the life out of anything, and Beaux-Arts
thinking had a tendency to do just that.
Still, it seems to Inc the modernists went
too far in their wholesale censuring of
the approach the Beaux-.Arts stood for.
Now, you take old Umbdenstock. Ile
was a hell of a guy, one of those old-
timers with the authentic rational spirit
that's peculiar to a certain type of
Frenclunan---a type, incidentally, that's
getting rarer and rarer. He must have
been over sixty then, a gruff old fellow
with a shaggy Clemenceau mustache.
At the atelier, he always wore an old,
dented derby. I he'd walk around the
studio?there were about thirty of us?
and rip apart, one by one. He'd just
scare you to death. Then he'd talk about
balance and imbalance, and the qualities
of poch( in a plan. That was Umbden-
stock's big word: poch, poeG,
the reason and order that lie behind even
the most minute phases of planning.
You find pocht' in the Paris Opera
House and the Bibliothi.que Nation-
ale - -the best buildings that Beaux-Arts
architects ever produced. There's some-
thing to the Beaux-Arts approach, too.
You really can't dismiss all traditional
building with glib avant-garde phrases."
Back in New York after his year
at the Beaux-Arts, 1 larrisiin worked for-
a few months with lcKim and then got
a in]) as a draftsman w ah firm headed
by Bertram Ci osvenor The
next year, he won R h Travelling
Scholarship, offered to a Iiitects who
have either studied or practiced in las-
sachusetts, and with this he spent a few
more months at the Beaux-Arts and
toured various centers of ancient cul-
ture, examining their architectural won-
ders at first band and pondering what
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they had to offer a contemporary de-
signer. Ile made five principal stops,
after picking out in advance one build-
ing, or ruin of a building, that he espy-
Hall% wanted to study at each of them:
iii Eg?pt, the temple of Luxor, the most
complete of the remains of the colossal
buildings that once stood on the plains
of Thebes; in Athens, the Propylaea,
the colonnaded gateway to the Acrop-
olis; in Syria, tbe temple group at Baal-
bek, which his friends had raved about--
and rightly, he decided -as the ultimate
in Roman grandeur; in Arles, the
Church of St. Trophime, whose twelfth-
century Romanesque portico Goodhue
adapted for St. Bartholomew's, in New
York; and in Chartres, the Gothic
cathedral. Harrison camped at each
of these sites for six or eight weeks,
soaking in the building's atmosphere,
clambering over the structure from top
to bottom, checking its dimensions with
It measuring tape, sketching its orna-
mental details, and making elaborate
drawings of it from every angle. Ile
originally intended to give this same full
treatment to St. Sofia, in COnitanti-
ilOPIC, but when he got there, the
mosque left him cold, and he didn't even
bother to take his measuring tape out
of his pocket.
trip made an enduring impres-
sion on the young pilgrim. Although
Harrison has never translated any pe-
riod structure as literally hs Goodhue
translated the portico of St. Trophime,
he has frequently adapted ancient ideas
I'm modern uses. Twenty-nine years
after studying the temple of Luxor, for
example, he borrowed from the Egyp-
tians in devising, a method of light-
ing the Corning Glass Works' dis-
play center, in Corning, New York.
"The Corning people wanted a setup
in which they could show off their wares
effectively to the visiting public,"
liar-
10011 says. "In the building we worked
out for them, the visitor walks from one
display room into another, and from one
kind of light into another. The key is
the dramatic handling of light, and no
one has ever improved on the Egyptians
in that department. The architect of a
temple like Luxor was out to work on
the eve of the beholder, like Cine-
rama --trying to stagger you with con-
trasts, and doing it. At Luxor, you
login by walking down a double row of
lions with intermittent patches of light.
Then the architect plops you into a
courtyard flooded with that blinding
Fgyptian sunlight. You walk across that
court', ard?it's as big as the Piazza of
Si, Nlark's - -and enter a hall, a closed
arcade of columns, each sixty feet high
NCIVEM?APPoINItasePrAgAgYir YO1080601676R004100060048-1
and ten feet in diameter, with a faint
light sifting down among them from
the clerestory windows. You walk
through this hall for quite a while--just
how long a time you probably have no
idea?and a feeling of awe and of sepa-
ration from life rises inside you. You
emerge into another courtyard?an-
other rectangle of harsh sunlight?and
then move forward into a sombre, shut-
in passageway, and this grows narrower
and darkee until, suddenly, you're there,
standing in the holy of holies?a pitch-
black room with one minute shaft of
light, like a spotlight, streaking through
a six-inch hole in the granite ceiling and
picking up the climax, which is the fig-
ure of the Cat God."
RETURNING to New York in
1922, Harrison rejoined the Good-
hue firm. Goodhue was a conscientious
idealist who treated his employees like
self-respecting guildsmen, allowing
them lunch hours of Gothic proportions,
so that if they wished, they could take
in an art exhibit or some similar cultural
liqueur before returning to the office;
he even went so far as to have his staff
present an annual Twelfth-night play,
following the custom in the building
trade during the Middle Ages. As an
architect, Goodhue did not think
primarily in terms of style; his position,
when he took one, was roughly midway
between that of McKim's, with its devo-
tion to the cinquecento, and that of the
young functionalist extremists, who
wanted to tear down Paris, Rome, and
even Stonehenge, and rebuild them from
the ground up with proper fenestration.
"Goodhue was an eclectic, and that's
supposed to be the most damning word
in the lexicon of the modernists," Harri-
son says. "But whether he was doing a
classical public structure, like the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences Building, in
Washington, or putting up a Gothic
church, like St. Thomas, on Fifth Ave-
nue, or striking out on his own, as he did
in the I,os Angeles Public Library and
the Nebraska State Capitol, his work
showed taste and care and originality.
The inscripthin on his me nusrial in the
Chapel of the Intercession of Trinity
Parish, here in New York, reads, 'He
touched nothing which he did not beau-
tify.' There can't be any argument
with that."
In the interests of efficiency, Good-
hue's staff was divided into two groups
of specialists - ow, T-Gothic, the other
classical. Harrison was a classical man,
having been hired specifically to super-
intend the construction of the National
Academy of Sciences l3uiholiiig, in which
Goodhue sought to endow an up-to-
date plan with an Athenian tranquil-
lity. The Academy of Sciences Build-
ing, which Harrison worked on for
about two years, turned out well?
so well, in fact, that it later served as a
guide, and sometimes as a blueprint,
for architects all over the country who
were commissioned to design i'mod-
: ernized-classical" courthouses, libraries,
- galleries, and other public buildings.
From time to time, Harrison was taken
off the Academy of Sciences Building
in order to help work out the designs
for the tower of the Nebraska State
Capitol, since it was Goodhue's policy
to call in outside men occasionally to
get a fresh point of view on some phase
of a project that might be going stale.
Goodhue died, quite suddenly, on April
23, 1224. "I think it was on a week-
end," Harrison says. "It seems to me
I came in to work on a Monday and
. learned that I'd been fired. The Gothic
" group had taken over. Most of us clas-
sical fellows were out on our cars. I
was, anyhow."
Harrison and another classical (flit-
cast, the late Robert Rogers, decided to
? go into business for themselves. They
rented office space in the National As-
sociation Building, at 25 %Vest Forty-
third Street, and set about corraling
clients. "Ihrough a cousin of Rogers'
who was the local sales representative
for a company that put out grated
cheese, they wangled a commission to
remodel the front of the Cheshire
Cheese Restaurant, on %Vest Forty-
third Street. The front was only eight-
een feet high and twelve feet wide, but
the partners labored over that facade
Is r twelve months; it gave them some-
thing to do when they were not out
scouring the town for their second cus-
tomer, whom they never found. Rogers
had some money of his own to tide him
over, but I larrison was reduced to tak-
ing in architectural washing. His for-
mer maitre, Corbett, gave him an odd
job now and then designing minor parts
of buildings, and Raymond Hood, a
brilliant alumnus of Goodhue's who IN a S
now doing- very well on his own, helped
out by thinking of I larrison whenever
he needed perspective sketches. .?\ fter
a year of just scraping by, Harrison,
following up a tip from Corbett part-
ner, Frank J. applied for, and
got, a lob as associate architect tor the
New York City Board of Education,
and he 31101 his partner, their restaurant
front finished and their patience ex-
hausted, happily dissolved their firm.
1 larrison's new job paid scvent? -five
hundred dollars a year, vs Inch he thought
"perfectly enormous"?so enormous, in
fact, that he felt free to marry Miss
Milton, a young New York social work-
er whom he had known for two years.
The job itself turned out to be nothing
much. In the course of one of the Board
of Education's periodic efforts to (10
something about the shortage of schools,
some municipal statistician had figured
out that a new school would have to be
completed every three days for the next
year to provide adequate facilities. Re-
sponding to this challenge, the Mayor,
John Hylan, who was no man to do
things by halves, had ordered five hun-
dred draftsmen and designers rounded
up and installed in a mammoth room in
a loft building at the Brooklyn end of
the Williamsburg Bridge, with instruc-
tions to turn out plans for new schools
at printing-press speed. Harrison was
brought in to supervise all five hundred
of them. To his dismay, he found that
he was expected to make a daily in-
spection tour of the room, stopping at
each drawing board long enough to
drop some incisive critical observation.
It took Harrison nearly six months to
get around the room once. "By the time
I got back to the first board, I found
that the design had been approved by
some official while I was out in center
field, and contractors were already bid-
ding on it," he recalls. "Same thing
the second time around. IIell, I wasn't
doing any good at all." Harrison re-
signed at the end of a year and took
a part-time job teaching design at the
Columbia School of Architecture.
Then, in January, 1 927, I Ielmle, his
good angel, got in touch with him again
and invited him to join the firm of
Corhett, as a junior partner.
At the time 'Mink & Corbett be-
came I 'clink, Corbett & Harrison, the
firm was engaged in a number of proj-
ects that were both financially and ar-
tistically stimulating, among them the
Roerich Museum, on Riverside Drive,
and No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and, in Allen-
town, Pennsylvania, a twenty-three-
story skyscraper; it was buildings of this
sort that, three years later, prompted the
Rockefellers to pick the firm, along with
three others, to design Rockefeller Cen-
ter. Harrison felt that at last he had
found his niche. "I finally knew for
sure that I wanted to be a modern
architect," he told a companion one
day early last spring as they were cross-
ing the Plaza of Rockefeller Center on
their way to I larrison's office. "I don't
mean I was a purist. That isn't in me.
Bot while I was hacking away at the
Board of Education, it became absolute-
ly clear to me that the only sound :11)-
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proach to architecture is to think in
terms of the people who will be us-
ing the building?that the function of
architecture is to take care of human
beings in a pleasant way. Say it's a
school you're doing. The question
you've got to ask yourself is: 'how do I
utilize the best principles of design and
the advances of our modern technology
so that we get something here in which
the teachers and the pupils?and the
little guys who make up the commu-
nity?can come together in the most
agreeable atmosphere we can create for
them?' That was how Corbett and
Ilelmle looked at architecture, too. And
the firm was busy ! I had to take work
home every night. For the first time in
I don't know how long, I had my feet
under me?lots of work to do, and
good, steady pay for doing it." Harrison
slowed his ambling gait and looked
down at the skaters whirling below on
the ice of the sunken plaza. "Do you
know what an architect is?" he asked,
smiling wryly. "When all is said and
done, an architect is a designer with a
client." ?II ER BERT WARREN WIND
This is the first of three articles
on Mr. Harrison.)
?
CORRECTION
Former Vice President Henry
Wallace is probably still puzzling
over last Tuesday's column. Prob-
ably readers are puzzled too. The
column, which referred to Eisen-
hower's efforts to study the prob-
lem of Oakies, Arkies and mi-
grant workers, contained this
sentence: "Wallace was one of the
few government officials who ever
tried to migrate across the U.S."
Frankly 1 was thunderstruck
when 1 saw this line in print. So
probably was the Wallace family.
"Fhe ex-vice president, ex -secre-
tary of agriculture did move from
I)es Moines, Iowa, to Washington
to join the Roosevelt cabinet and
now lives on a farm north of New
York City. But he certainly did
not migrate across the United
States in the usual sense of the
word, and he certainly was no mi-
grant farm hand.
So I looked up the column as I
originally wrote it. It read: "Wal -
lace was one of the few govern-
ment officials who ever tried to do
much about the Oakies, Arkies
and itinerant farm hands who mi-
pened was that the teletype op-
grate across the .U.S." What hap-
erator skipped one line. My apolo-
gies.
Ifowever, considering all the
copy they have to transmit, it's a
wonder teletype operators don't
make more mistakes.?Drew Pear-
son in the Pottsville (Pa.) Repub-
lican.
What makes you think they don't?
There's a growing trend toward travel to Europe in
the Winter, Spring and Fall. Not only on the part
of seasoned travelers but by first-time visitors as
well. And with good reason, too! In `Thrift Season",
transatlantic fares?by sea or air?are lower and
bookings are easier to obtain. Travel in Europe is
supremely comfortable, hotels are less crowded
and?unhampered by the summer rush?you have
a better opportunity to get to know the real Europe,
to meet and mingle with her friendly people?at
work and at play!
Sec your Travel Agent ?now! For further infor-
mation, write each country in which interested.
Address: National Tourist Mice of (name of
country), Box 258, Dept. E, New York 17. N. Y.
EUROPEAN TRAVEL COMMISSION
AUSTRIA ? BELGIUM ? DENMARK ? FINLAND ? FRANCE ? CI ARIAN Y ? GREAT ARITA IN
Mat ? ICfLAND ? IRILAND ? ITALY ? I UXIAIROUPG ? MONACO ? stOol ailOIDS
NORWAY ? PORTUGAL ? SPAIN ? SWLDLN ? SWITZERLAND ? TURKEL' ? YUGOSLAVIA
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SI
..?Prt0FILES...)
II--THE
NEXT to Frank Lloyd
Wright, who, as the father
of modern American archi-
tecture and perhaps its only true
genius, occupies a unique position
in his field, the person commonly
regarded as the most influential
figure in present-day building de-
sign in this country is Wallace K.
Harrison. A fifty-nine-year-old
New York architect who has been
associated with about seven hun-
dred million dollars' worth of new
buildings 'during the last quarter of
a century and was a member of the
seven-man team of architects re-
sponsible for Rockefeller Center,
Harrison was nevertheless largely
unknown outside his profession
.until he took on the job of architect-
in-chief of the headquarters of the
United Nations. Except for his pre-
dilection for wearing shirts of faint-
ly Left Bank hues and for daubing
away at tortuous abstract paintings
when his spirits sag, there is little or
nothing in Harrison's appearance or
manner that fits the classic concept of a
high-geared creative temperament. A
tall, rugged man with a stalwart con-
science, who fell into architecture by
accident when, at the age of fourteen,
he went to work as an office boy with
a construction company in his native
Worcester, Massachusetts, Harrison
talks with a raspy New England twang,
wears what is left of his gray-brown
hair at a conventional length, adheres
whenever possible to a nine-to-five
working schedule, and regards potato
farming as the consummate hobby.
"Wally's a perfect Yankee?always
was and always will be," an architect
who has known Harrison for thirty-five
years Said recently. "That's one of the
reasons he gets along so well with for-
eigners, like the members of the inter-
national board of design who worked
with him on the U.N.?he's exactly
what they expect an American to he
like. Wally's as plain as an 01(1 shoe. It's
no fa?e. He really is. But he's a fellow
who learns from experience and he's
had a lot of it, so today he's also a very
sophisticated man. He understands busi-
nessmen, politicians, and scientists just
about as well as he understands archi-
tects and other artistic types. They all
feel, when they first talk with Wally,
that here, at last, is a kindred soul. He's
AR.CHITECT
SOUAR.E THAT BECAME. A
CENTER
really a sort of Renaissance man ?a
latter-day Michelangelo or Leonardo,
completely at home in many different
worlds, even in this age of specialists."
Over the years, Harrison, who has a
way of becoming personally attached to
the people he works with, has developed
a wide and varied circle of friends that
includes painters, bankers, construction
foremen, high-ranking statesmen of
many countries, Kiwanians, conserva-
tive and socialist tuditieal phibistiphers,
Steel magnates, and Latin-American
poets. Ile is always intensely concerned
about their problems, professional or
personal, and these arc likely to involve
him on so many levels at once that his
associates sometimes wish they had a
score card to identify the players. Last
autumn, for example, while he was
chatting in his office with a young man-
ufacturer of plastics, his secretary put a
phone call through to him. "I had no
idea who Wally was talking to," the
plastics man said later, "but they were
evidently discussing somebody who was
in very had straits?most likely, I fig-
ured, one of Vally's floundering artist
friends who was only a couple of steps
from potter's field. Wally, I could see,
was deeply disturbed. He kept pawing
his eyebrows and repeating phrases like
'We must do everything we can for
him' and 'He was our friend when we
needed him.' After he hung up, he
didn't say anything for quite some time,
and then he told me, 'We were talk-
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ing about Trygve Lie. We mustn't
forget him now that he's left the
U. N. and retired to private life.
Few people appreciate the terrific
ji:.;d.bheturned in as Secretary-Gen-
rWhile IIarrison's colleagues arc
generally agreed that he is a sound
engineer and an adventurous de-
signer who brings a fine creative
continuity to his buildings, they are
also getter:ilk agreed that, for all
his talent, it is his Renaissance-man
range of understanding and adapt-
ability that principally accounts for
the tremendous intltlenC,' he hati
had on modern architecture. "The
lug thing is the respect \Vally I lar-
rison commands in the business
world," the eminent architectural
historian Talbot Hamlin remarked
not long ago. "Over the last twenty
years, he's been a partner in firms
that have controlled a good deal of the
big money. At the outset, his connec-
tion ovith Rockefeller Center gave him
a reputation that the business world
looked tip to. And now, of course, the
U.N. job has added enormously to his
prestige. It's given him something of
the status of an international statesman.
All in all, he's achieved an extraor-
dinarily powerful position for an archi-
tect, .ind he's used it admirably. Ile's
been so phenomenally successful in
gaining the confidence of businessmen
that they've begun to accept innovations
in modern architecture more readily
than they ever did before. Thanks to
him, ma-nv business leaders have actually
become enthusiasts for the best HI pro-
gressive design. Harrison has won a new
kind of respect for the entire profession.
I shudder when I think what could I nit e
happened if the same opportunities had
fallen into the hands of a man who was
less responsible, or less creative, or both."
For his part, Harrison is inclined to in-
terpret the aesthetic headway he has
made in his dealings with the husiness
community as support of his belief that
architecture can rarely, if ever, be ap-
proached as pure art. "When 1,e Cor-
busier came over to work w;th us IM the
plans for the United Nations, he said to
Inc more than once that he had never
compromised with his principles," Ii ar-
rison told a friend a while ago. "That's
probably true of Corhu - --never compro-
mising,. \Veil, I've compromised more
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than once. Reality demands it, if tlu?
huilding's going to get built. The people
who talk about conceiving perfection and
sticking to it have never had to get down
on the :,round and get their hands dirty.
Out in Texas we've been working on an
office buildiniz for thy Republic National
liank of Dallas. Its thirty-six stories
high far and away the tallest building
ever put up in that part of the coun-
try. To emphasize that fact, our client
wanted to top it off with some distinc-
tive emblem that could he seen for miles
away across the plains?a landmark by
day and hy night. kVe drew up a
number of designs. The client didn't
like them. I le had his OW n hally
wanted a replica of the Statue of Liberty,
with the torch lit up. Now, what do
you do in a case like that? Tell him he
can't have it? If he wants it, he'll have
one put up anyway. All you can do is
present what you consider superior de-
signs as forcefully as you can, and hope
your arguments will sink in.'' In this
instance, I larrisnn gained a distinct vic-
tory. The client scrapped the Statue of
Liberty idea in the hope of hitting upon
symbol !mire truly representative of
Texas hut finally reversed his field and
settled for a simple, spikelike spire that
Harrison considers not half bad.
A man who thrives on change of
pace, Harrisun has designed private
hnuses, naval installations, hnusing de-
velnpments (iii Bnioklyn, QUCCI1S, and
the lironx1, service men's centers, fac-
turies, embassies, a hotel, a hnspital, and
a building for a ion. His fellow-archi-
tects, however, think of him primarily
as a specialist in office buildings, and
with reason, for he has had a hand in
the design and construction of almost
a score of them, nearly all skyscrapers.
His firm, Harrison & Abramovitz, is
currently at work Oil two more big
nffice buildings, both of them scheduled
to be cumpleted in 1956. One of these
is a nineteen-sturv structure for the
United States Rubber Ciunpany that
is piing up tin the site of the old Center
Theatre, at Sixth A Veil lie and Forty-
ninth Street, and the other, forty-two
stories tall, is being built for the Socony-
Vacuum Company and will occupy the
entire block bounded by Forty-first and
Forty-second Streets and Third and
Lexington Avenues. Harrison has long
pondered the basic arguments for and
against sk? scrapers, which many inter-
nationally mm dud critics regard
as the one truly original con-
tribution America has made to-
architecture, and he has come
to the conclusion that there are
mnre good things than bad to
be said for them, provided that
there is sufficient space between
them -as he feels there is at
Rockefeller Center?to admit
the proper amount of fresh air
d sunlight. Not everybody,
of course, has a plot the size of
Rockefeller C.7enter's to fool
aniund with, but lIarrison be-
lieves that wals and means of
assuring open space can always
be devised if the architect is
n-ally sold on its merits. For
instance, the base of the forty-
t w 0-st I) ry Socony-Vacuum
Building will be only three
stories high; nn this will stand
two separate, well set-hack,
eleven-story slabs, connected
by it central tower that will
rise twenty-eight stories above
them. By way of stressing the
fresh-air-and-sunlight theme,
llarrison is thinking of plant-
ing grass, trees, and shrubs on
the nlnt of the three-story part
of the building, with, possibly,
an abbreviated brook purling
among them.
"It's your wife, Ed. Want
to listen to her?"
HARRisoN's first experience
in designing skyscrapers
came in 1928, shortly after he
had become a junior partner in
the architectural ti rut headed
by Frank j. IL:link and Har-
vey Wiley Cnrbett. firm
of Ilelmle & Corbett was one
of the country's busiest and
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best, and for Harrison, a rather gaunt
and run-down thirty-one at the time he
was asked to join it, its decision to take
him in was pretty .much of a lifesaver.
Since he had never had any money
except what he contrived to earn, his
years of architectural apprenticeship had ,
been rather tough going. During that
period, in which he put in a little over a
year at the Ecole Nationale Supi:rieure
des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, with the help
of a scholarship and a thousand dol-
lars he had saved up as a naval en-
sign in the: First World War, he had
slowly changed from a devout, if
inquiring, traditionalist to a modern-
ist?not an extreme modernist, to be
sure, but a thoroughgoing functionalist.
This position corresponded quite closely
to that held by Corbett, the wheel horse
of the firm and a recognized leader in
office-building design. From 1914 on,
Corbett, an angular, vocal, red-headed
engineer from California who had
studied at the Beaux-Arts himself,
had been championing the so-called
"stripped classical" office building, a
structure of simple, vertical lines un-
marred by banks of Ionic columns or
any of the other standard motifs of the
? well-bred facade. Today, of course,
Corbett's views are . commonplace,
but in the first quarter of this century
they were considered radical, for the
? skyscraper was a long time finding
itself.
Since there has never been any real
agreement on how high a building: moist
be to be considered a skyscraper, it is
impossible to say who designed the first
one, but certainly Chicago architects
were ahead of all others in recognizing
the advantages of height in meeting the
problem of housing large businesses un-
der a single roof. In 1885, William
Le Baron Jenne)/ put up a ten-story
building, supported by a steel frame-
work, for the Home Insurance Com-
pany in that city, and six years later the
sixteen-story Nionadnock 13u11ding, also
in Chicago, was completed, setting an
all-time altitude record for a structure
whose entire weight was horne by ma-
sonry walls. (To bear that weight, it
was necessary to make the NIonadnoul's
walls twelve feet thick at the base. ) In
1895, Louis Sullivan, of the Chicago
firm of Adler & Sullivan, built, in Buf-
falo, what many authorities regard as
the finest of the early skx scrapers,
the thirteen-story Guaranty
Gradually, hoWeVer, New York became
the center of skyscraper construction for
a number of reasons, including the tend-
ency of big Inisinc;,sisi,,t,,concentrate in
l
Nanhattan, tileera rise in the
price of land on which to build here,
and the island's hard-rock substratum,
which provided a good support for the
tremendous weights involved. In 1913,
Cass Gilhert's NVoolworth Building was
opened on lower Broadway; seven hun-
dred and ninety-two feet high, with an
eighteen-story tower rising above its
forty-two-story base, it was the tallest
building the world had ever seen. Not
long afterward, the municipal authori-
ties became alarmed at the spread of
shoulder-to-shoulder skyscraper con-
struction, which had already made a
sunless gulch of ?Vall Street, :1/1(1 passed
it zoning law that put an end to sheer
vertical walls and required architects to
provide more light by tapering their
buildings with setbacks every few stories.
No ceiling was placed on the towers
of buildings, however, and in 1931,
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon showed the
world what a tower could be when the
firm's hundred-and-two-story Empire
State Building was completed, setting a
rue ()rd for I()ftiness twelve hundred
and fifty feet?that stands to this day.
At about the time Harrison joined
& Corbett, the firm was draw-
ing up plans for a twenty-three-story
skyscraper that the Pennsylvania Power
& Light Co. wanted to build in Allen-
town. "That building, the first sky-
scraper I ever worked on, has always
seemed to me to be the perfect illus-
tration of why the skyscraper was the
logical answer to the changing business
scene in this country," I la I'lltiM1 re-
marked not long ago. "Pennsylvania
Power and Light had started out with
joist a simple office in .-111entown. As
its business kept growing, it had to
keep finding new office space. By the
late twenties, it had taken over ten
or twelve houses on both sides of one of
Allentoyyn's main streets and was using
each house for :1 separate department.
In the skyscraper we built, these de-
partments were Placed one on top of
another, and the increase in etii(iency
was enormous. You i:111 lose a harrel If
time, among other things, in a strung-
out horizontal la? out. To give \ on an
example, when I was down in Wash-
ington (hiring the war, workings for
Inter- \ merican hairs, nit office was
at the southeast corner (if the seventh
floor of the Commerce Budding, and
in\ boss's was at tile northwest rorn,r
If the se(uuni floor. ( )le 41:11 Ik 1,/,'ked
it to See 111/W 1,11g it tk 111(' to gut
,101_ ?-t?\ (AI
(11)Wn th(nrl'. AMC t
minutcs, 1111 a 111.,It?rn ,c raper,
V, here the horiont;i1 41i,st:incc,.. don't
rc-;u hit 111:Ittcr 11111Ch, ,11 th,11't
111111: :t it liku- th;:t, long
an efficient relationship between the
height of the building and the elevator
'system. Fifteen stories is about ideal for
each bank of elevators. NVe've found
that if you run a bank any higher than
fifteen, there's too much waiting. You
could increase the speed of the elevators,,
all right, but human beings couldn't
take it."
April, 1929, about two years after
I I elmle & Corbett had becomt
Helmle, Corbett & Harrison, Helmle
retired and 1Villiam II. MacNIurray-
was taken in as a partner. Late in 1929,
the new firm of Corbett, Harrison &
Nlai-Nlurray was chosen, after a com-
petition, to collaborate with two other
architectural firms on the project that in
time became Rockefeller Center. Of the
two other firms, one, also chosen as the
: result of the competition, was Hood &
Fouilhoux, consisting of Raymond
Hood, who had designed the Daily
News Building, on East Forty-second
Street, and .-?ndri.. Fouilhoux, a French-
: born architect and engineer. Thu third
?firm was Reinhard & I lofmeister, con-
sistiT, of Andrew Reinhard and Ilenry
Iluufmuister, who did not Ime, to com-
pete, because t hey were regtilarly as-
sociated with the construction enter-
priecs (It John R. Todd, and Todd had
been selected to run the Rockefeller
Center show. A highly successful op-
erator in the fiercely competitive field
of renting office spacc, Tntld WAS also
prunintcr and builder and haul been
ini:urilt responsible for the construc-
tion ui such blue-chip ventures as the
Cunard Building, the Architects
tilt Ritz Towers, the Barcla\
and the (;raybar Building. Ile
was a big, inguni(ws, and frasciblu nian,
and, being suspicious of architects, he
V us sehlum happier than when baiting
111-,111111ellt one. After summoning
}food to his offiu e, iii the Graybar
;Ind informing him that he had
been t hosen as one of the architects of
the Rockeieller project, Todd turned to
windoW, W:1Ved a hand in the direction
Hi Hood's celebrated Daily News Build-
inu,, and growled, "\Ve're hirm!' soul
not on :10, ,d that 1)10 in Spite 1/1
Tittld 111111sCli had got in on tiltprIt,t durinu,, the summer oi 1929, wh, n
Rauckelellua Center or Aletropolaan
:square, :us it 1% :1. then C:111ell W:1S 111.11C
Inocrt? 111.111 :111 in Ow mind of
jolm I). Ro,kcfebbtr, r. Back in 1
Rot kcIeller, thini!rh not :in ardunt
11:141 Isecil wrstimird
ic ()th, Kahn 111:11 :New York ought nu
hale a new opera house that would rank
It 1111 tile lint's( 111 the wodd. \void
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THE NEW YORKER
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of this got around, it was greeted with
bravoes and promises of support by the
trustees and the more illustrious patrons.
of the Metropolitan Opera Company,'
and, thus encouraged, Rockefeller, in
January, 1929, leased a tract of land
he had had his eve on from Columbia
University, which had received it by,
grant of the state legislature early in the -
nineteenth century. This tract, of some
twelve and a half acres, comprised,
roughly, the three blocks bounded by
Forty-eighth and Fifty-first Streets and
Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The lease,
calling for an annual rent of about three
million dollars, was for twenty-four
years, with renewal options until the year
20 1 5. It was originally planned that the
opera house, to be designed by Benjamin
Wistar Morris, would be situated at the
heart of the plot, and buildings on the
remainder of the land would be rented ?
out to commercial interests as offices and
shops. Rockefeller had barely complet-
ed the negotiations with Columbia when:
word reached him that, for several corn-1
plex reasons, mostly stemming from;
clashes of personality, the Metropolitan:
people's eagerness to have a new opera
house had utterly subsided. Jolting asi
this intelligence must have been even to
a Rockefeller, John D., Jr., rolled with
the blow. lie resolved to go ahead just
the same with a midtown cultural and
business center, and chose Todd to
head a board of five managers who
would build and operate the project.
Todd's 'firm, the Todd, Robertson,.
Todd Engineering Corporation, was to
let all the contracts and dig up suitable
tenants, including cultural ones. Todd
was to he responsible only to Rocke-
feller.
Early in 1930, after a lengthy search
for something that could fittingly take
the place of grand opera as the cen-
tral attraction of the development, Todd
and his board decided that the best bet
was radio- -the big new medium of
mass entertainment. NVith Rockefeller's
blessing, 'Fodd took his idea to ()wen I).
Young, the chairman of the board of
the Radio Corporation of America, who
passed it along to David Sarnuff, the
president of R.C.A., and the upshot
SN :IS that R.C.A., together with its
subsidiary, the National Broadcasting
Company, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum,
agreed to rent a vast amount of space
in the Center and make it their head-
quarters. Thus the Radio City hranch of
Rockefeller Center came into being.
Actual construction on the first build-
ing the R .K.O. was started in Sep-
tember, 1931 . The riveting could be
heard blocks away, for the depression
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was closing in and no other construction
was in progress in the city. By that time,
Todd agents had been sent abroad to
try to interest companies in various Eu-
ropean countries in banding together
on a national basis, with each group
taking a building as ,a focal point for ,
their commercial activities in the United
States. The agents were a diligent lot,
and it was out of their efforts that the
present British Empire Building, the
NIaison Francaise, and the Palazzo
d'Italia materialized.
For all the lofty intentions of its back-
er, Rockefeller Center might have be-
come nothing more than a covey of
Graybar Buildings roosting on some of
the most expensive land in the world if
the architects who designed it had not
been an unusually independent lot. For
years, American a rchitects had been
dreaming of the magnificent things they
would do if ever they were given the
111(111(.1', the site, and the freedom to build
a city from the ground up a city of
towering buildings and broad vistas that
would dennin,trate the beauty of space
:is well as 01 mass. Of course, none of
them expected such an opportunity to
come their way, and there were cynics
who said that even if it did, high aspira-
tions would soon yield to the pressure
of the client's insistence upon the tried
and true. Now, all of a sudden, seven
of these architects found themselves in
a position to design, if not a whole city,
at least a city within a city along the
Imes of their most improbable dreams.
To be sure, the fortunate seven could
not utterly disregard Todd and his pre-
occupation with conservative, tenant-
pleasing, revenue-producing design, but,
by and large, Corbett, Fouilhoux, I lar-
rison, I 1 ot meister, h11, \lac:\ 1 u 'TAY,
and Reinhard managed to create a coin-
munitl of buildings that only a few
years before would have been considered
hopelessll visionary. They set up thvir
headquarters in the Gra har Buildino,
in two large rooms, one ectly above
the other, that were connected by a cir-
cular Iron staircase. Each room was
about a hundred and thirty teet lono and
lorty leet wide, 0 after :1 conference
room :Ind the princird,:
11;111111,111rd ill, di( re was plenty ot space
left tor the desks and drawm!r boards
01 tile draftsmen :11111 deshiiners I.
man as a hundred at .1 time -who
worked on the leans. Hie place was
also fin nish?1 with a lar.,ie table, ,lit
whik h Renk' Chiunhcllan, the sculptor,
made clay models of the vari,ais plans
under di.k n.ston; triintects find models
useful in determining which of their
exploratory ideas will work out best
in three dimensions. 'File architectural
combine plodded away in these quarters
for some three years, by which time the
designs for the first ten of the fourteen
buildings that were originally planned
for the Center had been completed.
Anxious as they were about the individ-
ual features of each building, the archi-
tects' overriding concern was to settle
on a unified plan for the entire Center.
Of the hundreds of preliminary plans
dreamed up, mulled over, and rejected,
the most fanciful was one that proposed
covering the three blocks with one
mammoth pyramidal complex of struc-
tures linked by subterranean streets and
aerial ramps for both pedestrians and
automobiles. There was a brief period,
too, in which some consideration was
given to the notion of treating the three
blocks as a Chinese walled city, but this
was discarded because the architects de-
cided it not only was wrong aesthetically
llilt also might discourage shoppers from
entering the compound.
The first plan to be adopted, early
in I 930, had as its key structure on Fifth
Avenue an elliptically shaped building,
fourteen stories high, to be situated be-
tween Forty-ninth :111(1 Fiftieth Streets,
with its longer axis running east and
west; behind it was to be an open space,
now the Plaza, anti, behind that, the
lofty R .0 -\. Building, with its hand-
some and original setbacks. Todd and
his associates were banking on the curv-
ing lines to lure the public off the Ave-
nue and into the stores that were to
omprise a fashionable shopping center
III and around the lower level of the
Plaza. In \larch, 1 93 1, a diagram of
this plan and a photograph of a model
of the elliptical building were released
Ii) thc press. There followed what the
Tino., called, in an editorial, "a perfect
stream Id (O111_'Cti()11, 011e
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NOVEMBER 2 7 9 19 34
may say, wondering malediction," di-
rected principally against the elliptical
building?it looked a good deal like a
lady's hatbox?which, in the opinion of
many highly articulate New Yorkers,
violated the plan for the whole Center
and completely muffed a heaven-sent,
opportunity to beaUtify the city. "I
doubt if any other architectural under-
taking ever received such a lambast-
ing," Harrison says. "All of us at the
Graybar thought we'd be fired, but
John D., jr., stood behind us. Ile sim-
ply said, 'I never read the papers when
they criticize men who are working
for me.' "
Nevertheless, in the face of such
violent opposition, the architects decid-
ed to abandon the elliptical building in
favor of the two rectangular six-story
buildings that are now the British Em-
pire Building and the Maison Francaise.
No one will ever know what effect those
curving, hatbox lines would have had
on shoppers, but there is no denying
that the sixty-foot-wide promenade
running between the present two build-
ings has succeeded. in luring as many
people onto the grounds of the, Center
as even Todd could have wished. At
first, however, most of them just strolled
there, and the question was how to
entice them down into the shops in
the Lower Plaza. Slowly and pain-
fully, while buildings continued to go
up all around them, the architects and
Todd's building officials fumbled their
way to a solution. First, they installed
the statue of Prometheus and its accom-
panying fountains in the Plaza, and then
they persuaded the Cafe Francais and
the English Grill, which had been op-
erating on the street level, to try their
luck at the Lower Plaza's south and
north ends, respectively, each of them
being given fifty per cent of the open
area facing Prometheus for outdoor ta-
bles. At that point, cold weather set in,
and the Lower Plaza stood as bare and
empty as ever. Finally, since there
seemed to be no better suggestions, the
now famous skating rink was tried out,
as a desperate means of putting the
empty space to some use, however slight.
To almost everyone's astonishment,
the rink caught on immediately, and
the shops around it have prospered ever
since. "That's the way .it goes some-
times," Corbett once said. "The skat-
ing rink turned out to be the perfect
attraction for Rockefeller Center, and
planning had nothing to do with it.
On the other hand, planning can, of
course, work wonders. By giving up
sixty feet of Fifth Avenue frontage?
an unheard-of thing at the time?and
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using it as a channel between the French
and British buildings, we sacrificed an
obvious source of revenue. But in do-
ing so we increased the value of the
land inside the Center immeasurably.
It's funny, but when a job of designing
is tackled with honest-to-goodness im-
agination, and perhaps a touch of dar-
ing, you usually discover that it produces
? the only kind of architecture that really
? pays off in dollars and cents."
By the autumn of 1933, some two
years after the excavating started, the
first seven of the buildings were fin-
? ished: the R.K.O. Building (thirty-
one stories) in October, 1932; the
? Radio City Music Hall (ten stories)
? and the Center Theatre (nine stories)
in December, 1932; the R.C.A. Build-
ing (seventy stories), the R.C.A. Build-
ing West (sixteen stories), and the
British Empire Building (six stories)
? in May, 1933; and the Maison Fran-
caise (six stories) in September, 1933.
By then, too, ground had been broken
for three more buildings?the Palaz-
zo d'Italia (six stories), the Interna-
tional Building (forty-one stories),
; and the International Building North
(six stories). This threesome, front-
ing Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth
and Fifty-first Streets, opened in May,
1935. Meanwhile, flood, the driving
force of the architectural collaboration,
had died in August, 1934, and his death
,! precipitated changes in two of the three
firms working on the Center. Har-
rison dropped out of Corbett, Harri-
son & MacMurray and, after a year or
so as an independent, he and Hood's
partner formed the firm of Harrison &
Fouilhoux. Corbett, Harrison & Mac-
Murray then became Corbett & Mac-
Murray. Reinhard & Hofmeister re-
mained Reinhard 81 flofmeister. This
; setup prevailed until the thirty-six-story
Time & Life Building was completed,
4
131 SAND-WI C H E5 11)
in April, 1937, after which Corbett &
MacMurray stepped out of the picture,
leaving the two remaining firms to fin-
ish up the Center with three more
buildings: the fifteen-story Associated
Press Building, opened in November,
1938; the sixteen-story Eastern Air
Lines Building, opened in October,
1939; and the twenty-story United
States Rubber Company Building,
opened in April, 1940. 1,A/id' these clone,
the architectural team disbanded. In
1946, when the thirty-three-story Esso
Building was announced as an added
starter, Harrison was named as con-
sultant to the architects in charge.
IN the course of the decade or so that
I la rrison spent with Rockefeller
Center, his status both as an architect
and as a man of the world changed no-
tably. In his middle thirties at the outset,
he was the youngest of the seven archi-
tects, and during the conferences at
which high-level policies were threshed
out by his associates, Rockefeller's advis-
ers, Todd's men, and officials of Com-
who had agreed to take office
space in one or another of the buildings,
he was seldom asked for his views. "I
didn't get anywhere until I took up
cigars," Harrison says now. "The big
conferences were held in the Graybar
Building after a lavish lunch or dinner
at the Barclay, and I'd come into the
conference room from the dining room
bursting with ideas. The minute I saw
a chance to speak up, I spoke up. Even
when I knew my points were damn
good, they never made the slightest
impression on anyone. It took me a
couple of months to figure it out. It
wasn't so much that I was a kid com-
pared to the rest of them. The trouble
was that I 'd been wasting my ammuni-
tion --I'd been doing my talking before
the older men had digested their meals
and were ready to think. I wasn't a
cigar smoker, hilt front that time on,
when they passed the cigars around, I
took one, and waited till we had all
puffed them down to the butt before
I said a word. It really made a dif-
f e rence."
As Rockefeller Center took shape,
Harrison came to be more and more
respected by his associates as a good
all-round man to have on the team.
A good many of the people connected
with the Center in those days feel that
it was he who, after Hood's death,
emerged as the stianig man, capable
of pushing through the necessary agree-
ments between the architects and the
management before differences of opin-
ion degenerated into a test of egos, as
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THE NEW YORKER
conflicts have a way of doing once
the initial enthusiasm for any long-
term collaborative enterprise has evap-
orated. While no one architect can
he credited with the design of any of the
Center buildings, it is clear that, as time
went on, Harrison's ideas began to carry
increasing weight with his colleagues,
and in consequence, experts think, some
of the later buildings embody a good
many of them?particularly the Eastern
Air Lines Building, which was the Cen-
ter's first slab-style structure. From the
very inception of the Center, I larrison
had been plumping for the slab, con-
vinced that the simpler the form of any
object, the stronger its impact. For that
reason, too, lie was opposed to the set-
backs on the front of the R.C.A. Build-
ing; he, argued that they would give it a
consciously artistic touch that might not
wear well. The front was set back any-
way, but six years later, in 1 938, when
plans for the Eastern Air Lines Build-
ing came up for consideration, Harri-
son's colleagues were ready to go along
with him on the idea of unbroken slabs.
They approached this new project bold-
ly. The eleven-story tower of the build-
ing, rising onindented and unadorned
above a five-story spread-out base, is
almost as sheerly rectangular as a
matchbox. Because the Eastern Air
Lines Building looks so small next to
its 13robdingnagian neighbors, sight-
seei?s are inclined to ignore it, but archi-
tects regard it with respect as the
trail blazer of a wholly new approach to
office-building design?one that, a doz-
en or more years later, was given its
most lucid and striking expression to
date in the United Nations Secretariat
and in Lever Ilouse, which was de-
signed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
In 1932, after Todd had with some
difficulty been persuaded that leading
painters and sculptors should be brought
in to decorate the Center, Harrison,
who had advocated this step after stub-
bing out many a postprandial cigar, was
sent to Europe to line up first-rate
artists there. Carl Mulles and 'Jose Maria
Sert eventually came to New York and
added their contributions to those of Lee
Lawrie, Paul Manship, William Zor-
ach, Diego Rivera, and other North
American artists, but I Iarrison was un-
able to work out any arrangement with
Picasso, Despiau, Matisse, or Maillol.
"There was always a conflict in sched-
ules," he recalled recently. "We didn't
have any trouble with the French artists
about subject matter, since we were
willing to leave that up to them. I re-
member telling old Maillol?we wanted
him to do a sculpture for the entrance
to the Maison Franoise?that he would
have absolutely free rein. 'I can do only
one thing?a woman,' he said. 'How
do you want me to do her?lying down
or standing up?' "
I IF offices of I I,arrison & Abramo-,
vit./ are on the second floor of the
International Building, in R ockefelle r
Center, and its staff, which fluctuates in
size according to the amount of work
on the agenda, averages about sixty-
five --a figure that includes forty or so
draftsmen, who toil in a much part-
tinned room the size of a couple of
. basketball courts. The whole place is
, . ?
air-conditioned and soundproofed; the
walls are brightly painted in blue, white,
I gray, and orange; and, all in all, it is
the sort of office that one would expect
a successful firm of modern architects
to Occupy. It is, however, a far cry from
what Harrison was accustomed to up
to last February, when he moved into
it. During the year he operated as an
independent, before the Harrison &
Fouilhoux partnership was formed, his
office consisted simply of a single, bare
room on the fifty-second floor of the
RU .A. Building, occupied by a skeleton
staff of half a dozen draftsmen. One
of the designers who whiled away his
. time in this room was Harrison's
present partner-1\4;1x Ahramovitz. A
graduate of the University of Illinois
School of Architecture, Ahramovitz
spent his first two years in New York
teaching elementary and advanced de-
sign at the Columbia School of Archi-
tecture. lie became associated with
la rrison quite by accident. Around
the time Ahramovitz came to New
York, Harrison and some other estab-
lished architects, including Ralph \\Talk-
er, who designed the Irving Trust
Company Building, at 1 Wall Street,
and the New York Telephone Co im-
pally Building:, on West Street, were
conducting seminars at the New School
of Social Research, each consisting of
a group of three istudent-architects. At
Walker's invitation, Abramiwitz signed
up for Ins seminar, but through a cleri-
cal error, he found himself in Har-
rison's. He meant to change over to
Walker's, hut somehow he never got
around to it, and at the end of the
course, he accepted his instructor's in-
vitation to join the skimpy Harrison
staff. "There we were, hanging around
in that room on the fifty-second floor,"
Aiwa mu 'it'.'. recalled recently. "Wally
was too busy at the Graybar Building
to spend much time with us. \Ve drew
up the plans for a couple of houses the
firm was doing ill Bermuda, but that
was the only real job we had. The rest of
the time, we made work for ourselves--
or, rather, \\rally made it for us. Once,
we spent eight months redesigning Cen-
tral Park- -not because anyone had com-
missioned the firm to do so but because
Wally thought it would be a stimulating
exercise. We started with the premise
that Central Park was a traffic bottle-
neck. Our problem was to figure out a
scheme that would unplug it and still
keep the greenery." Harrison felt that
by paying the occupants of the lonely
aerie regular wages for solutions to theo-
retical problems of this sort he was hard-
headedly investing in a future staff. "I
wanted designers who would attack a
problem by thinking about it in fresh
terms," he says. "I wanted a staff that
would keep moving away from the
stereotype. After Fouilhoux and I
formed our partnership, I found he felt
as I did, and we carried on that way. I
know some critics have said that because
we never knew exactly where we were
going, our office was weak. Maybe it
was, and maybe it still is. That's the
way we like it?no assembly-line meth-
ods, I mean, no trademarks."
In 1 935, Harrison and Fouilhoux
moved their headquarters from the
R.C.A. Building to a larger, though not
much more formal or attractive, office
on the eighth floor of the International
Building. Here the firm ran a sort of in-
ternational clubhouse, where visiting,
Eunipean architects and kindred artists
could always count on finding a chair
:10(1 a drawing board waiting for them.
Among those who availed themselves of
this hospitality were Alvar Aalto, a Fin-
nish architect and designer who has since
done several important buildings in this
country, including a dormitory for the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
the French abstractionist Fernand
1,(1.ger; Oscar Nitzchke, a Swiss archi-
tectural designer; and Maurice Rotival,
a French expert on city planning, whom
Harrison brought over here to help
teach a course in that subject that he had
been asked to set up at the Yale School
of Eine Arts. All this was in line with
Harrison's ht-lief that the people in his
fi nii should keep in touch with what was
going on in other parts of the world and
in the allied arts, and, to make his staff
even more aware of new ideas and
techniques, he invited two European
painters? -Atm'd(1.e ( )zenfant and Wer-
ner Drewes --to give a series of after-
hours office lectures on form, attendance
optional.
As Harrison and his partner put
Rockefeller Center further and further
behind them, they began to branch
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out. During the years immediately pre-
ceding the Second World War, they
designed the Rockefeller Apartments,
on West Fifty-fourth Street; the Theme
Center for the New York World's
Fair; the Avila Hotel, in Caracas, Ven-
ezuela; and, with Shreve, Lamb &
Harmon, the architects of the Empire
State Building, they drew up the plans
for the new Hunter College building,
on Park Avenue. The earliest of these
projects, the Rockefeller Apartments,
grew out of the esteem Harrison and
Nelson Rockefeller had come to feel
for each other during the construction
of the Center, and was the first of
many enterprises on which they worked
together. The two men first met in
1926, around the time Harrison mar-
ried Ellen Hunt Milton?making them
brothers-in-law of a sort, for Mrs. Har-
rison is the sister of David Milton, who
was married at that time to Nelson's
sister, Abby Rockefeller?but they saw
little of each other until the Center was
well under way. Rockefeller, who was
a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art,
discovered at the Center's planning con-
ferences that Harrison shared his enthu-
siasm for modern art. "I came to admire
a lot of other things Wally stood for, too,
and the way he stood for them," Rocke-
feller says. As time went on, Harrison
and Rockefeller got in the habit of meet-
ing once a week in midmorning or mid-
afternoon in the Gateway Restaurant,
to the rear of Prometheus in the Lower
Plaza, and exchanging ideas over cof-
fee and a bacon roll?two strips of
bacon grilled on the halves of a soft
roll, a Rockefeller favorite. The Rocke-
feller Apartments was one of many ven-
tures that originated at the sessions in
the Gateway. The plot on which the
apartment houses stand, on the north
side of Fifty-fourth Street, between
Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was originally
NOVEMDElb
set aside by the Rockefellers to serve
as one corner of a huge subsidiary
Center, devoted to the arts, that would
extend north from Rockefeller Center,
covering the eastern half of the blocks
from Fifty-first to Fifty-fifth Streets.
The plan for this undertaking fell
through when the Kriendler brothers,
the proprietors of "21," declined to sell
their building on Fifty-second Street.
(Before the Rockefellers became rec-
onciled to abandoning the project, they
considered going ahead despite "21,"
running streets around the restaurant,
and setting it off as an island?an ar-
rangement that would certainly have
given the holdout Kriendlers an ideal
location, making their place a sort of
Ile de In Cit, with the arts on one side
of them and the Chase National on the
other.) The Rockefeller Apartments,
consisting of two twelve-story buildings
separated by a spacious garden, were
an audacious departure from the com-
mon, or non-garden, approach to apart-
ment-house design, which, seeking only
to provide the maximum number of
rentable rooms, used every legal inch
of the plot for building. "The I cal-
estate groups were really browned off
by the Rockefeller Apartments," Ifer-
man Axelrod, a New York builder,
said recently. "Those two buildings
changed the standards. 1Vith Rocke-
feller and Harrison giving up fifteen
per cent more space to light and air
than they were required to, you can
guess what happened. Before the build-
ings were half finished, all the apart-
ments had been leased and people were
scrambling to get on the waiting list--
and, mind you, this was at a time when
apartments all over the city were beg-
ging for tenants."
The I lotel Avila, which was not only
the second collaboration between Nel-
son Rockefeller and Ilarrison but
Rockefeller's first .important sortie into
inter-American affairs, was built on an
old hacienda a few miles outside Ca-
racas. Constructed of reinforced con-
crete as a precaution against earth-
quakes, the Avila was the forerunner
of modern tropical hotels. It consists of
a central lobby flanked by two long nar-
row wings, each of them with an open
gallery along one side and private bal-
conies on the other; the rooms stretch
the width of the wings, from gallery
to balcony, and are equipped at both
sides with sliding panels for cross-ven-
tilation.
JN 1936, Harrison's firm was chosen
to design the Theme Center for the
New York World's Fair on the basis of
a competition open to all architects prac-
ticing in the city. This competition,
which was judged by the World's Fair
hoard of design, made up of a dozen
architects, engineers, and industrial de-
signers, was a rather unusual one, in
. that the designs submitted did not have
to he descriptive of the building the
candidate proposed putting up, hut
might consist of no more than an ex-
panded sketch of something that would
give the judges an idea of the terms
in which the competing firm was
thinking about the Fair. Harrison &
Fouilhoux entered the competition with
a design for a tent. "We'd been ask-
ing ourselves and everybody else in
the office, 'What's most expressive of
the atmosphere of a fair?' " Harrison
says. "We had a designer working with
us then named Oltar-jevsky, who was
a very talented guy from Leningrad.
We got him to tell us what the famous
fair at Novgorod was like. Ile said they
didn't have permanent buildings?just
bilge canvas tents that were lighted at
night with colored lanterns. That, we
:agreed, was the essence of a fair --blow-
ing tent tops and gay, lively colors. In-
stead of colored lanterns, our tent had
.a lot of colored balloons." After hav-
ing been selected to do the Theme
Center on the strength of this design,
Harrison and Fouilhoux put aside the
tent idea because they felt that it hard-
ly suggested a therne, and began ex-
ercising their imaginations in an effort
'to hit upon some architectural- con-
.cept that would really stir the pub-
and also symbolize the spirit of the
I air. "One of die special functions of
:irellitecture is to provide people with
,:??hance to see something they've nev-
er seen before," Ilarrison has since
said. "For its day, the Eiffel "rower,
1the focal structure of the Paris Ex-
,!position of 1889, was perfect. There'd
never been anything like it. What's
more, the visitors could go right up
to the top of the tower. That was
someth nig in I 889--man had never
built that high above the earth before.
lit. 1939, though, height meant noth-
in,. Well, the theme of the Fair was
'The World of Tomorrow,' and the
hist idea that struck me as a step in
the right direction was to use a sphere,
a complete sphere, as a major clement of
the design. Ever since the dome was
used by the Romans for the Pantheon,
in the second century, architects had
been trying- to expose a larger and kirger
see meta 1)f it undercutting it more
:anti more, until, in Persia and India,
they succeeded in e \ posing 111111.1V per
.0:111 of it. Why couldn't we If a total-
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Iy exposed sphere? It had one merit, I the sphere in half, and if you put it
at least?to my knowledge, it had never I behind, you'd get something that looked
I been done before." Harrison and Fouil- I like one of those old German war hel-
1 houx and their assistants made hundreds wets with a spike on top. Then the board
! of sketches, experimenting with spheres objected that placing the trylon to one
I of all sizes and combining them with side of the sphere threw the design off
objects resembling Maypoles, spinning balance and that this was all wrong;
tops, inverted obelisks, clover-leaf inter- miummental buildings were always
; sections, ellipses cutting across other symmetrical. Wally readied for our
ellipses, and so on. Sometimes, IIarri- pile of photographs and calmly exhibited
son thought of discarding the complete them, one after another- the Cathedral
sphere, or perispherc, but he found him- of St. Mark's and the Campanile in Ven-
self returning to it again and again, ice, the Cathedral and the Campanile in
and filially concluded that it would Florence, the Cathedral in Padua, and
? be most effective combined with a three- several others. If that sold anybody, they
sided obelisk, or trylon. After he and concealed it beautifully. There wassome
his staff completed their one thousand- long-jawed hemming and hawing, and
and-thirty-sixth sketch, he settled on a then ?Vally suddenly grabbed a cigar
perisphere two hundred feet in diam- from his breast pocket, stood up, and
eter, connected by a circular ramp with threw it angrily on the floor. I've never
a seven-hundred-foot trylon, standing asked him, but I don't think he ever
alongside. intended to smoke that cigar when he
Then Harrison was faced with the put it in his pocket. I'm almost certain
task of selling the idea of a trylon and he brought it along in case the meeting
perisphere at a meeting of the board got bogged down to the point where
; of design. In addition to a clay model it violent gesture was needed to shake
of the proposed structures, I Ia rrison everyone up. That's the only time I've
and Walter 11. Killian), Jr., an archi- ever seen him go into an act, and it was
tect who had worked closely with him an awfully effective One. The discussion
on the design and who accompanied got right down to business, and pretty
him on this crucial mission, took along soon Walter Dorwin Teague came
to the meeting sonic twenty photo- out for the design. That broke the
graphs of famous Italian buildings, all ice. One by one, the others dropped
of them asymmetric in composition. their reservations, and the design was
"Wally thought they might come in accepted." To save money, the Fair's
luindy," Kilham recalled a while ago. board of estimate later reduced the
"Ile figured that the board might not size of the trylon and perisphere by
be very receptive to a design that didn't some twenti per cent. Harrison lets
have a tower at each end, or in the always believed that the design would
middle. Ile couldn't have been right- have hero far more effective in itsorig-
il dimensions, but, ha% ing won his
er.- First, the board wanted to know na
ed di- main point, he settled hir the dimin-
why the trylon hadn't been placed
reedy in .front of the sphere or directly ished tr.) Ion and perisphere cheerfully
behind it. Wally replied that if you enough.
put the trylon in front, it would cut
N the late nineteen-thirties, I larrison
Ai found himself assot i;( iii more
and
liii)) I I requently a .1,rolli)
of other (-omparativell oullv \c 'V
Yorkers \vho had risen pi ecociously
the top of their iu-of
HMV turiiillp. their attention increas-
ingl) to :immunity and national
affairs. liesides Nelson Rot
this oterie in) hided Itenton,
Adolf \ Rom!, litit k-
minster huller, liiliit t A. loses, and
Folio I Icy NN,itli !he ap-
proach of the Set (lid ohi1V.ir, it
to appeal 1(1(?VIt:1111c 111.11 111(),(' tit it,
111('11111(.1s tvhii1 11111 Hut 111"('11(1\ 1.1,1.11 I-
1:11(.(1 1111" !1,11(111111(111 Si It Ri Wut11(1
tulill 1111 111 \ V;1',11111110111 sn(ili)r ,)1'
1:11TINI)11 I111-11(?(1 tiucte ulime,
1941 tell months cifer Rockefeller,
Vl hi) 11.1(1 pi e?t ailed upon tlit?tilt
administration to set up the Office of
the Corirdinator of Inter-American Af-
fairs and had then been asked to head
It. Harrison joined the office as director
of the Cultural Relations I)ivision and
turned over the job of running the
architectural firm to Fottilhoux and
their new partner, Abramovitz.
NVlien Harrison was shown the of-
fice in the Commerce Building that he
was to occupy, along with his assistant,
J'eorge Dudley, a young member of the
firm he took down to Washington with
him, his first reaction was "Let's throw
these desks out and get some drawing
boards in here." By the time the draw-
? ing boards came, Harrison had made
:a successful adjustment to the standard-
'. model desk, hut otherwise Ile accepted
little of the apparatus of bureaucracy.
I Arriving at his office after a breakfast
to the. accompaniment of a lesson in
Spanish from a young Mexican mew-
het' of his IVashington staff, he would
swiftly dispose of the mound of paper
that had accumulated in his "in"
has-
kit overnight by jotting down a few
notes to himself :in whatever inter-
- and intra-office memorandums he con-
i.adered important, pencilling on a cor-
ner of certain letters a laconic instruction
to his secretary, such as "Say no polite-
ly" or "Nlake appt.," and tossing the
residue into it drawer. "If you ? stick
this stuff in a drawer, it almost always
takes care of itself," he once explained
to a fellow-administrator. "And, that
way, you have time to see people and
get on with the' job." Even though
1 larrison and Dudley had adapted
themselves to desks, they spent a great
deal oil their time' in a chart room,
where they built up a collection of maps
and diagrams bearing on various aspects
of the Central and South American
ountrie.s, such as railroad lines, areas
where yaws were endemic, locations of
hrane hes of the Export-Import 13ank,
and sites of strategic mineral deposits.
"The mission of our office was to w ork
out :I program that would improve
the standard of living in the twin-
It countries we were working with,"
)1idley says. "The charts proved in-
to clarifying
.duahle when it came
our rt-:1111ti of data and pointing up
the areas to conccntrate on?arellS
ti lien:, if we improved living condi-
tions by combatting uws, let's say, we
:dso improve relations between
the incri,as. In the chart room, lye
hill! ii ill at i ill I fingertips." Since the
pi :id octs it the 1 1 rrison- Dudley chart
ooin C:Nil? and quit kIt ti rasped,
kit iii i! was looked upon Is cssential
Ill u Ii iii ui domitAries who i:orie
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here to get tilled in on what was happen-
ing south of the border.
In December, 1944, when Rockefel-
ler was appointed Assistant Secretary
of State in charge of -relations with other
American republics, Harrison moved up
to Deputy Coiirdinator of the Office of
Inter-American Affairs, as the agency
had been more simply renamed, and
later he became Coiirdinator. Ile found
the work fascinating, and threw himself
into it with a conscientiousness that made
some of his fellow-bureaucrats smile.
Once, on a trip to Caracas, after he had
spent a morning being taken on a tour
of the city by a ranking government
official, he met a labor-union leader at
lunch whom he persuaded to take him
on a second tour of the city, so that he
could get the other side of the picture.
"On the whole, I think our Latin-
American program was damn success-
ful," Harrison says. "The Act of Cha-
pultepec, which the nations of North,
Central, and South America signed. in
1946, is one of the best defense pacts in
existence today. Nelson took several of
us down to Mexico City for the signing,
and it gave us all a terrific feeling of 'ac-
complishment. Government work can
he dull as the devil, and frustrating, but
there were stretches during the four
and a half years I spent in 'Washington
when I've never been more engrossed in
my work, or happier. As a matter of
fact, there were days at a time when
things were humming along so nicely
I never even gave a thought to archi-
tecture."--1 I ER BERT WARREN WIND
(This is the second of three articles
on Mr. Harrison.)
?
NEW YORK, Oct. 16 (AP)?Mrs. Mag-
dalena Marsili, of Rockford, Ill., sailed
today on the S.S. Constitution, for Rome.
She will attend the beautification of a
younger sister .. . ?Chicago American.
It's a long way to go.
?
She was graduated from Huntington
High School and has been employed as
A secretary in New York City. Her hus-
band is a buyer for a Philadelphia Dept.
Store and deserved four years in the U. S.
Air Force.?The Long Islander.
Maybe it's not too late.
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Approved For Release 2002/08/21 : CIA-RDP80601676R004100060048-1
*..PR.OFILES
AIVCHITECT
III?A TAXI TO TM', U. N.
0 N days when a strung southeast
wind is whipping over Manhat-
tan, 'Wallace K. I larrison, a
fifty-nine-year-old New York archi-
tect, who served as director of planning
for the Permanent I le:idyl:triers of the
United Nations, frequently finds it hard,
to center his full attention on his current
projects. A tall, rugged, Roman-faced
man who grew up ill Massachusetts and
is endowed with one of that region's
traditional traits, a ponderous con-
science, Ilarrison finds his thoughts
travelling irresistibly across town from
his office, in Rockefeller Center, to the
East River and the United Nations
buildings- -specifically, to the Secretar-
iat, the thirty-nine-story slab whose
broad sides are uninterrupted walls of
glass. "I don't know what I could have
been thinking of ?a building with all
that glass on such an exposed site!" he
exclaimed one recent windy morning to
a group of his associates in the firm of
Harrison .& Abramovitz. "Boy, those
windows take a beating! I know as
well as the next guy that the gustiest
winds we get in New York are south-
easters. And I know that the East River
is a perfect highway for them, and they
sweep right up it unimpeded. I knew
all these things when we were working
on the Secretariat, and still, somehow, I
didn't do any about it. Well, our
experts tell its the windows are perfect
now, and that helps, hut putting them
in in the first place was hardly a stroke
of brilliance." Coming from the archi-
tect who is customarily regarded as the
most influential American practitioner
of his generation, such a declaration of
. personal fallibility amounts to outright
eccentricity nowadays, when it has be-
come standard operating procedure for
prominent architects to revaluate their
earlier buildings as more impecca-
ble, more epochal, than even they con-
ceded at the time they designed them.
"Actually, it's ridiculous to compare
Wally Harrison with the geniuses of our
profession," the British architect How-
ard Robertson, who was a member of
the international board of design that
planned the United Nations headquar-
ters under Harrison's leadership, said
not long ago. "Wally is an entirely dif-
ferent breed of animal from Frank
Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier. They're
pure artists, great revolutionaries. Wal-
'S a 111:111 pit I feSS11111 is architec-
ture. There's a true strain of the dream-
er and the poet and the artist in him,
hut his visions are always tempered by
a realistic appreciation of the conditions
he's operating- under on any particular
joh- -the money that's available, the
men he's working with, the time factor.
lie's a far rarer t? pe than a genius, and
in our world, such :is it is today, he's
at least as valuable. lie can get dif-
ficult jobs done. I suspect that if the
task of building the U.N. had been
placed io the hands of any of the sev-
eral architects who felt that the com-
mission should liave been theirs by oli-
vine right, the U.N. delegates would
still be leading a highly nomadic ex-
istence."
People who have known Harrison
ever since he first came to New York,
III 1916, are inclined to feel that his
ability to combine dreaming, with get-
ting things done may he attributed to
the extreme vicissitudes of his earlier
days, which were marked by a pro-
longed stretch (of joyless grubbing that
gave him ample time to muse about
things as they might be, ;ind was fol-
lowed by a swift rise to a position of
responsibility in the world of affairs.
Unlike most of his colleagues, who
made architecture their career because
it appealed to them as a means of using
their creative gifts to benefit the com-
munity, Harrison stumbled into archi-
tecture by accident when, at the age of
fourteen, he found himself obliged to
support himself and took the first job
he could get, which happened to be that
of office boy for a construction company
in his home town of Worcester. This
job gradually led to drafting, and
aroused his interest in architectural mat-
ters generally. In all, Harrison strug-
gled along through seventeen lean
years, interrupted only by a bitch in
the Navy during the First World \\Tar
and a couple of spells in Paris as a rather
overage student at the Ecole Nationale
Supi.rieure des Beaux-Arts, before he
broke into the big time as a partner in
an architectural firtn headed by Harvey
Wiley Corbett?a connection that
shortly afterward gave him the oppor-
tunity to help design Rockefeller Cen-
ter. When ilarrison hulks back on the
long and painful apprenticeship that pre-
ceded his arrival?something he does no
5 5
"a//erce I /lliTipiii
more ut ten than necessary- he feels
sure that it accounts for the skepticism
with which he now listens to some (of his
fellow-architects as the loftily insist
that a modern building should have no
connection with the past, or that it
should be a machine fom livihl, (or that
it should be a symbol of its own func-
tion. "I consider myself a modern
architect, but a fellow like me, who
has gone through the null, never goes
in for complete and uninhibited revolt,"
he says. "When you leave your draw-
ing board and start getting your hands
dirty, you stop thinking- of buildings
as a challenge to your ability to create
absolute art. You're happy to settle for
good buildings that get built, in the
hope that they'll lead to progressively
better buildings."
Harrison spent tell years working on
Rockefeller Center, and in the course
of that extended meeting of strong
minds and hard currency he developed
from a talented young designer into a
mature architect. At the same tune, a
friendship that has had a marked bearing
on his career ever since grew up between
him and Nelson Rockefeller, who in
1938 became president of Rockefeller
Center, Inc., and, like Harrison, is a
man with a strong catalytic gift. As
the thirties advanced and the world
situation grew increasingly grave, these
two men shared the concern of many
others about the apparent inevitability
of war in Europe and the possibility
that such a war might spread across
the Atlantic. Rockefeller, wh(o knew
Latin America well, was especially
fearful about the South American re-
publics; since the United States had been
paying little attention to them for years,
he felt that they might well fall to the
totalitarian,. In default unless this coon-
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try adopted a new and vigorous hem-
ispheric policy. With the assistance of
Harrison, Beardsley Ruml, and other
informed friends, Rockefeller drew up
an exhaustive memorandum un the sub-
ject and turned it over to Harry 1 I
_
kills, who brought it to the attention
of President Roosevelt. Impressed, the
President at once created a special gov-
ernment agency called the Oflice of
the Coiirdinator of Inter-American
Affairs, and in August, 1940, appointed
Rockefeller to head it. Rockefeller sug-
gested to Harrison that he drop every-
thing and join him in Washington, hut
this proved impossible just then, what
with the commitments of lIarrison's
firm ?Harrison, fouilhoux & Abramo-
vitz?and a project lie was working on
with Rockefeller's brother Laurance
and the Navy to save steel by building
ships of concrete. Tlw following juin.,
however, I larrison turned tile firm over
to his two partners Andre' Fouilhoux
and Max Abrarnovitz - and joined
Rockefeller's agency as Assistant Co-
ordinator in charge of its Cultural Re-
lations Division. He subsequently be-
came the Deputy Coiirdinatur, and in
March, 1945, after Rockefeller was
transferred to the State Departtnent,
took over the job of Coordinator.
WE N. AR in mind and thin in wallet
:ifter nearly five years of govern-
ment service, I larrison returned to New
York and architecture in April, 1946.
IU found his firm in bad shape. Not long
after I larrison had gone to NA'ashington,
Abramovitz, who was regarded by his
partners as an enormously skillful de-
signer, had joined the Air Force, and
had spent two years on General Chen-
nault's stall, building airfields in China.
Vouillunix carried on alone as best he
could until shortly before the end of
the war, when he was killed by a fall
from the roof of a housing project the
firm was putting up in Brooklyn. "Ile'd
been terribly overworked and under a
great strain for a long, long time," I tar-
115011 told a friend recently. "I le was
a \vonderful guy, Fouilhou - -and a
superb architect. We'd been partners
since 1935." Ilarrison and Abramovitz,
who was released by the Air Voice
early in 1946, set ahout vorganizing
the firm, and before long they had all
the business they could handle. Their
first spectacular postwar commission
okly
"I ccish 1 hail my life tH
tr-ver. Believe me, I'd pick it iliffereiii lawyer!"
was to draw up plans for X City, the
city-within-a-city that XVilliam Zeck-
endorf, then executive vice-president
of the real-estate broke-rage firm of
Webb & Knapp, was thinking of putting
up on approximately the Salllt? Site :is
that now occupied by the United Na-
tions. Soon, however, Harrison found
that he wasn't happy simply devoting
himself to business as usual. "The bat-
tles were Over, but the struggle was .
just as intense," he says. "NV-e couldn't
suddenlv drop countries we'd been help-
ing during the war anti tell them to
shift for themselves. There was a lot
of work to be done, and among the
many things we had learned while we
were running the South :\inerican of-
fice was that you don't build a stable
world just with propaganda and ban-
quets." As staunch believers in the
United Nations, which had voted to
make its permanent headquarters some-
where in the United States and was
weighing the advantages of various
sites, Rockefeller and Harrison were
delighted to accept appointments to a
Committee of Plan and Scope that
May or O'Dwyer had organized, with
Robert Moses at its head, to present
the case for New York C'ity. The
United Nations Permanent Headquar-
ters Comtnittee--a liody appointed in
January, 1946, and consisting of one
representative from each of the member
countries had specified that it must
have a site of at least two thousand
acres (it later disco-tied this require-
ment ), and tilt only available' city-
owned area that size was in Flushing
Nleadow, a practically subaqueous tract
xvhose shortcomings were obvious to
everybody-. Rockefeller and Harrison,
both of whom I eh that the cosmopolitan
Spirit of Ni'.' York and its exceptional
communications facilities made it the
natural home tor the U. N., prepared a
one-reel mii\ it showing how the city
planned to refurbish the Meadow if the
1. 'lined Nations would agree to settle
there, hilt it faded to stir the members of
the Permanent I leadquarters Commit-
tee; durin:2, their tours of duty out there
at Lake Success, then the U.N.'s tem-
porary' headquarters, they had had their
fill of the reHon's subtle swampland
aroma, and wanted no more (il it,
with or without improvements. By De-
cember, 1946, the Permanent Head-
quarters Committee, under the chair-
manship of Dr. Eduardo Zuleta .Angel,
it Colombia, had finished inspecting
i it various other sites that had been
offered to the organization, and had
iist made up its inind to take. a
ten-square-mde one in soburban Hula-
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delphia. The Australian delegation and
quite a few others representing coun-
tries in the Pacific area favored San
Francisco, but the important European
deleg,ations, Russia among them, were
dead set against the West Coast. As for
the East Coast, an early preference for
Connecticut's Fairfield County cooled
off after several members of the Perma-
nent I leadquarters Committee had been
stoned by the local inhabitants during
an inspection trip there, and Boston's
hest offer wasn't in the same leafy
league with the spacious tract that Phila-
delphia was prepared to make available.
On the morning of Sunday, Decent-
her 8th, Nelson Rockefeller, who was
Ill Alexicu City for the inauguration of
President Miguel Aleman, received a
joint telephone call from I farrison and
['rank .1amieson, a former Pulitzer
Prize-will ing newspaperman . who
handles the Rockefeller family's rela-
tions with the press and the public. They
were calling to inform him of the Phila-
delphia threat and of the need for im-
mediate action if he still had any hopes
for New York. Rockefeller, who did in-
dee(l still have hopes for New York, ar-
rived at LaGuardia Field around six
that evening and was met by I larrison
and Clark Fichelberger, another mem-
ber. of the Mayor's committee. The
three men were driven directly to the
United Nations' temporary headquar-
ters at Lake Success, where, after being
held up at the gates for an hour while
the guards checked to see if they were
who they claimed to be, they had a talk
with Secretary-General Trygve Lie,
1)r. Zuleta Angel, and Senator \Vat.-
ren Austin, the head of the American
delegation to the U.N. Rockefeller
asked them whether they thought the
members .of the Headquarters Com-
mittee might still consider settling in
or around New York. Senator Austin
said that he thought the minds of the
delegates were still open, but that,
:Is far as New York went, while
they would not be averse to the coun-
tryside around the city, they would
prefer a site in it, such as the X City
plot, which Zeckendorf had not long
before attempted to sell tothe municipal
authorities as a possible location for the
headquarters. 'rile important thing to
bear in mind, Dr. Zuleta Angel put in,
was that the Committee was scheduled
to convene on Wednesday morning and
reach a final decision then. In short,
Rockefeller had two and a half days.
Riwkefeller spent Monday think-
in!, and conferring in his New York
vifty_sixth floor of the
oflice, on the
R.C.A. Building. Ile reached one con-
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sumahlv had in mind a rankling experi-
ence in the twenties, when he gave the
League of Nations two million dollars
for a library in Geneva and was held
up for a gift tax of more than a third
of a million by the United States gov-
ernment --a bite that rather took the
joy oiut of his philanthropy.)
After the initial wave of exultation
had subsided, Nelson and his cohorts
deployed for action. Before the sepa-
rate clearances with the city, county,
state, and federal governments could be
tackled, one piece of business, on which
everything else hinged, had to be taken
care of: An option had to be obtained
on the river site, which consisted of sev-
enteen acres between Forty-second and
Forty-eighth Streets, and First Avenue
and the East River, from leckendorrs
firm of N'Vebb & Knapp. Harrison was
nominated for the job. Ile was the log-
ical candidate, for he knew all about the
site from having worked on it at the
time Zeckendort was planning to build
X City there. The first step, therefore,
was to find '/,e kendorf. After an hour
of putting in phone calls to various likely
pia( es, Harrison finally traced him to
the Monte Carlo, a night club on the
northeast corner of Nladison Avenue
and Fifty-fourth Street that was one of
the odder properties controlled by NVebb
Si Knapp. Zeckendorf told Harrison to
come on over.
It was ten o'clock when Harrison
arrived at the Nlonte Carlo, the pocket
of his jacket bulging with a block-by-
bhick map of the site. "I tried to assume
an air of nonchalance, but I couldn't
make it," Harrison recalls. "Did you
ever see that Disney movie called `Salu-
(his Amigos'- - the part where Donald
I )iick gets stuck high up in the Altiplano
of the Andes? The air is so thin that
I )imald's heart is shown plunging a foot
and a half out of his body every time it
beats. Well, my heart was thumping
just like that." I larrison found Zecken-
(hid in a private dining room at the rear
id the club, attending :I gala birthday
party that was being given for otw of
his partners, I hairy Sears. harrison and
kvndorf adjourned to the chili's
private office.
"You know that site on the river?"
remembers saying, without
ant warmup whatsoever. "I want you
to give me an option on it for the U.N."
"Li it for the U.N.?" Zeckendorf
asked.
"Yrs, it's for the U.N., and for
m idling else," larrison replied. "I'm not
committing myself any further--about
who I'm representing, or anything."
"O.K.," Zet-kendorf said, without
elusion--X City was out; it would un-
doubtedly be too expensive for him to
swing alone. The most likelv alterna-
tive, he decided, was Pocantico Hills,
back of Tarrytown, where he, his fa-
ther, and his four brothers all had
homes, and on Tuesday morning he
launched an eleventh-hour drive to
round tip enough land for a site there.
Ile outlined his plan to his father at
lunch, and to his brothers during the
afternoon, and in every case he told
them of Senator Austin's appraisal of
the delegates' taste in the matter of an
urban versus a suburban site, but added
Ills belief that the Pocantico I tills area
was worth at least a vCIV good try.
Each of the Rockefellers volunteered
to give up a considerable portion of his
individual holdings at Pocantico Hills,
for a total of a thousand acres. Then,
spreading out large-scale maps of the
region on the cocoa-colored carpet of
his office, Nelson hurriedly negotiated
through his Westchester real-estate
broker for options on two thousand acres
adjoining the Rt ii' Iii le IS' properties,
which would bring the complete parcel
to three thousand acres. Ile now needed
only to borrow a million dollars front his
father for the purchase of the land cov-
ered by the options in order to wrap up
the whole shebang. At the end of the
day, Nelson called Austin to inform
him that he had pretty well succeeded in
acquiring a site in Westchester, but to
Ins dismay, the Senator replied that he
now thought the members of the Head-
quarters Committee would not be in-
terested in any New York site that was
not actually in the city. Gloomily, Nel-
son teleplumed his father at seven o'clock
on Tuesday evening, surrounded by an
agitated group consisting of Harrison,
Jamieson, Mrs. Louise Boyer, who is
Nelson's assistant, and John Lockwood,
one of the family's lawyers. Nelson told
John D., Jr., how things stood, and
then, as he listened to his father's com-
ments, his face broke into a smile of
astonished rapture. "Why, Pa!" he ex-
claimed. Cupping his hand over the
mouthpiece, Nelson told the group
around him, in a sort of whispered yodel,
"Ile wants to know how much that site
along the Fast River would cost! Ile
wants to give it to them! ... Wally,
how much do von think it would take to
get it ?" Eight or eight and a half million,
Harrison guessed. Upon receiving this
information, Rockefeller p;Te informed
Rockefeller fiLi that if the river plot
could be purchased, he was prepared to
donate it to the United Nations, on one
condition that the United States waive
the federal gift tax. ( .1ohn I)., Jr., pre-
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&
liesitatittn. "I'll give you an option on
it for eight and a half million."
Harrison said that this would be
satisfactory, at which Zeckendorf,
after consulting briefly with Sears,
stretched Harrison's map out on the
desk and, after outlining the six blocks
involved in the site with his pen, wrote
at the top:
$8,500,000 East side of 1st Ave., 42nd
to 43rd?Sq. Block 43-44 44-45 1st Ave.
to East River -I Sq. Block 46-47 NE Cur.
47 and 1st Ave. 100 X 100 North Side
47th at Consolidated Garage $8,500,-
000, to United Nations only.
On a side margin of the map he wrote
an additional note: "$8,5 0 0,0 0 0 to
U.N. Dec. 10 for 30 days," and then
both he and Sears signed their names.
. Suppressing an impulse to grab the
telephone on the desk and report the
good news then and there to the group
that was sweating it out in Nelson
Rockefeller's office, Harrison tucked
the map back in his pocket and walked
out into the December night and over
to the St. Regis Hotel, where he dialled
his associates from a pay station in the
lobby. "Nelson told me to pick up a
bottle of champagne," he recalls. "He
said a celebration was in order. \Veil,
I fished in my pockets when I got out
of the booth and found I had only a
dollar and eleven cents on me. That
struck me as funny as hell. Here's a
guy who's just closed a deal for eight
and a half million dollars and he hasn't
got enough dough to buy a dozen bottles
of Moxie."
In the end, the party got its cham-
pagne?two _quarts of it?by sending
out to "21." They polished off a quart
(the other is still aging commemora-
tively in a pantry adjacent to Rocke-
feller's office) and then got down to
business again. In one corner of the
room, Lockwood, the lawyer, studied
Zeckendorf's scrawled notations on the
map and, after an hour's pondering,
solemnly declared that he thought it
would hold up as a valid option. In
the meantime?it had become Wednes-
day by then?a number of telephone
calls were put through. One was to
Robert Moses, who agreed to see Mayor
O'Dwyer the first thing that morning
about getting the city to cede its rights
to the streets, the river bulkheads,
and various strips of land it controlled
within the site. Anoiher call was to
Senator Austin, who was staying at the
Pennsylvania Hotel, now the Statler.
Austin is not particularly noted as a
man of rapid action, hut on this occasion
he performed like an Ohio State scat-
back. He called Washington, awakened
the general counsel of the Bureau of
Internal Revenue, and obtained his
substantial opinion that the government
would exempt John D., Jr., from pay-
ing a gift tax if the United Nations ac-
cepted his offer. Later that morning, at
about eight, while Moses was on his
way to see Nlayor O'Dwyer and Lock-
wood was calling Albany to negotiate
clearances with the state authorities,
Nelson Rockefeller--after breakfasting
With his father?picked tip Harrison
and they went up to the Harkness Pa-
vilion of the Columbia Presbyterian
Medical Center, where 1)r. Zuleta
Angel, who was in poor health, had
spent the night. They informed him of
their last-minute entry in the competi-
tion,
At a meeting of the Headquarters
Committee at Lake Success at ten
o'clock that Wednesday morning, Dr.
Meta Angel recognized Senator Aus-
tin, and the Senator made a dramatic
announcement of the Rockefeller offer.
Before adjourning, in a Hurry of excite-
ment, the I leadquarters Committee
instructed a subcommittee to inspect the
land in question that afternoon. The
next morning, following an enthusiastic
report by the subcommittee, the Head-
quarters Committee voted, thirty-three
to seven, to draft a resolution recom-
mending that the General Assembly,
then in session, accept the gift. Two
days later, on Saturday, December 1 4th,
the General Assembly voted, forty-six
to seven, to adopt the resolution. "When
it was all over, and we had won, I think
we saw for the first time why we'd been
successful," Harrison says. "It was very
simple, really. The delegates had want-
ed New York all along."
QOME three weeks later, on Jan-
uary 2, 1947, Secretary-General
Lie appointed Harrison director of plan-
ning for the United Nations Permanent
Headquarters. "Harrison was only one
of a number of architects who were un-
der consideration," a veteran United
Nations official stated recently. "There
was some talk at the time that he went
with the deal?that he was given the
appointment because of his connection
with the Rockefellers. That isn't so.
The Secretary-General solicited recom-
mendations from many sources. He de-
cided on the basis of these recommen-
dations that Harrison was the architect
best qualified for the post. Harrison
knew a great deal about the site, he was
well versed in the special problems of
building in New York, and he had had
experience working with governmental
officials and with men from foreign
h I
ountrie,:. In fact, lit'was uniquel
qualified."
Harrison and I ac got together in
mid- Januar\ for the first of innumer-
able turetin!rs they were to hold during
the neark six years it took to design
and build the. headquarters. Routine
matters, such as the chain of command
(I fart-ism] would report directly to Lie
or to Byron Price, an Assistant Secre-
tary-(_ieneral ) and I la rrison's sa la ry
(the same as that of the head of any
large department of the U.N. -twelve '
thousand dollars it year, plus another six
thousand to help out on income taxes),
were quickly disposed of. Then came
the delicate matter of how to select
the. architects who would design the
buildings, and in this Harrison and :
Lie were guided by the knowledge '?
that the old League of Nations had got
off to a woe fully bad start when, in ;
seeking a design for its Geneva head-
quarters, it held a competition open to
architects from all its member coon-
tries, failed to reach a clear-cut decision
as to the winner, and, in the course of
seven years of wrangling,, managed to
a.ffront individuals and nations alike in
wholesale lots before it at last erected
a building that no one was happy about. -
"Lie and I tried to make the machinery
, as simple and foolproof as possible,"
larrison says. "We decided we'd have
an international board of design that
would collaborate on drawing up plans.
for the headquarters buildings. First off,
we sent notices to all the member coun-
tries of the U.N., inviting them to nomi-
nate architects to serve on the board.
In a few cases- --like Soilleux, from
Australia, I remember, and Liang,
from China?when we felt we didn't
know enough about the men who were
nominated, we asked them to submit
samples of their work. Then the goes-
tion was how many members the board.
should have. We finally figured that!
we'd need about tun, to take care of '
all the areas that we thought ought to.
be represented?somebody from West-
ern Europe, somebody from Eastern.:
Europe, somebody from Scandinavia, at
least one from the British Common-
wealth, one from South America, one
from the Far East, and so on. We
picked the members of the board partly
for their talent and partly for geo-
graphical and political considerations.
We couldn't pick Alvar Aalto, who's a
wonderful architect, because Finland
wasn't a member of the U.N. We had
to pass up Mies van der Rohe and Walter
Gropius, because they were too closely
identified with prewar Germany. The
sixty-four-dollar question was whether
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oI not we should pick Lc Corbusier.
When you have to deal with matters of
opinion and problems of personality?
and, you may be sure, l,e Corbusier is
a man who can contribute plenty of
both it complicates the job. A good
many people strongly advised against
having him. On thy other hand, there
were some good reasons why We shouid
IlaVe him he was a great architect, of
course, and besides he'd been given such
a dirty deal in that League of Nations
competition when his plan, although it
was the choice of the majority of the
judges, was finally thrown out on the
absurd technicality that it had been
drawn up with the wrong kind of ink.
When all was said and done, we decided
w;ts better in than out." In ad-
dition to Le Corbusier, who, of course,
represented France, the hoard was made
up of G. A. Soilleux, of Australia; Gas-
ton Brunfaut, of Belgium; Oscar Nie-
meyer, of Brazil; Ernest Cormier, of
Canada; Su-ch'eng Liang, of China;
Sven Markelius, of Sweden; N. D. Bas-
sos', of Russia; Howard Robertson,
of Great Britain; and Julio Vilamayt, of
Uruguay. To supplement this group,
seven special consultants were later
added: Josef Ilavlii?ek, of Czechoslo-
vakia; Vladimir Bodiansky, of France;
.fohn Antoniades, of Greece; Matthew
Nowicki, of Poland; Peter Noskov,
of Russia; Hugh Ferriss, of the United
States; and Ernest Weissmann, of
Yugoslavia. "Two-thirds of the board
turned out to he marvellous architects,"
Harrisim says. "The other third were
gthH1 architeCtS."
The first of the architects arrived in
New York in early March?Robertson,
a methodical-minded, well-tailored
Londoner with a solid air of affability;
Ling, who was an archeologist at
heart and was overwhelmed by the
newness of New York; Bassov, a stocky,
middle-aged Russian engineer-archi-
tect, who had made his reputation
during the war, when he was en-
trusted with relocating his nation's
heavy industry cast of the Urals; and
Le Corbusier, crisp, high-pitched, and
garrulous as a blue jay, his lean face
dominated by thick-bowed, heavy-
lensed spectacles?and the others trick-
led in, one at a time, during the next
three or four weeks. Meanwhile, a
group of architects from Harrison's of-
fice, headed by Harmon Goldstone,
Abel Sorensen, and George Dudley, had
started developing a "program," which
is what architects call the documented
study they make to determine the space
and facilities a proposed building will
need in order to fulfill its specified func-
tiolls. I 1:11"rison's 11Thil Intel vietvcd dot.-
ol Set VIA:Uri:it ollikials ;111d 1111:1111)crs
HI 111c (;t'llerd ?\s,e1111,11 :Ind ihun ,:"11-
Vel-ted LIlti Miss 111 1111111ln:1U( )11 1111.1 I
:11'(1111.(CI.111-:11 1:1(1S :111(1 flg 11 \-
:11111)1r, estil11:Lting 111:t1 111 t flU :ts 111:1111
:is 1,21)5 it ply Might he (111111M ed ill
tile V:11"tous iIiiciii. :ilid
the Secrt1:16:11, they c1111e to tile Coll-
th:it the kidding to hou,e it
quiru 43(),S(1; sqllare 'cut id
office siyuc, le litect-
iii!* rooms, :111d 1,4-81i square feet lin-
"01 hut- strvik us." progrant, printed
in English And French, made t'very-
thing as plain as da% (vinyl an architect's
point of vicsv, and II
arr.son saN s he be-
lieves it helped ptit ever\ body in a hope-
ful frame til mind. In ans event, the
members of the board were in :t Loti-
spictiotisly amiable rnootl sylien they be-
gait em-Itan'ring ideas at their first regu-
lar met ling, held earls ill April in the
Headquarters Planning ()Ake, svhich
I la rrison had set up oil the twenty-
seventh floor of the R.K.().
Harrison picked this mi4.1town location
because he thought it would be a good
plan for the board to be physically sepa-
rated front the other it..tivities of the
United Nations, at Lake Success, and
therefore lesS eXpoSed to any possible
oblique political pressures.
After studying the prograrn, the
board %mud unanimousls In Let or of
putting up three buildings- one for the
(;eneral Assets-1111w, one to house the Set:-
;Old one for (-miff:rent:es of the
various councils and committees. From
the beginning, the Secretariat Building
was visualized by practically everyltods
as a skyscraper, since no smaller struc-
ture could provide the needed office
space and still leave enough room on
the site for walks, grass, and trees. 'Elie
antiability of the visiting architects
increased as they contemplated
this olwitms need for at least one sky-
scraper, SIMI:, as dill' were not reluc-
tant to admit, they had coine to New
York with the 1101)e oi getting a crack
at designing a real American cloud-
buster?an opportunity none of them
had ever had back home, and quite pos-
sibly never would have. To familiarize
them with the problems of building sky-
scrapers, Harrison appointed six Ameri-
can engineers and three American
architects to serve as technical con-
. sultants. However, since these consul-
tants popped in only when they were
asked to and since few of the board
members had been able to arrange to
stay in New York for more than two
or three weeks at a time- --incoming
architects were always humping into
outgoing OM'S at Idlewild --the group
that collected each morning in the plan-
ning office usually was small, averaging,
perhaps, eight or nine men. Their work-
room was an orthodox office, about
forty feet by thirty, with four cubby-
holes along one wall, to which members
could repait whenever they wanted a
little privacy. The board met around a
table in the center of the room?it
nearly always held plasticine models of
various projected deigns--and traded
their views in a mixture of French and
English. All of them except Bassos'
could speak at least one of these lan-
guages. Since no one else spoke Russian,
Bassov did the best lw could with an in-
terpreter and what little English he was
able to pick up as he went along. When
he liked an idea, he said so with a brusque
"Okay;" when he didn't, his response
was an explosive "Nokay." At lunch-
time, the members took turns escorting
their colleagues to restaurants that spe-
cialized in their native cooking. "Brun-
faut, the Belgian, preferred to eat at the
Brussels," Harrison recalls. "He knew
the proprietor. And Ilavliek took us
all to Liichow's when a new kind of
Czechoslovakian
:leer came in. Mostly,
though, they dug up w,,nderful little
spots I'd never even he:,rd of in all the
years I'd spent in New York. I've never
eaten better." The afternoons had no
set pattern; some of the members ram-
bled about the city studying skyscrapers
at first hand, some went to their hotel
rooms to work in private, and others
returned to the planning office and
; worked there. In the evenings, most of
the members visited with countrymen of
theirs or went out on the town.
Under no circumstances were the
, members at any time permitted to enter
the drafting room, which was next door
to their workroom. The drafting room,
where the rough sketches that were ap-
proved by the hoard were translated into
working designs, was mantled by a staff
? of draftsmen, designers, and modellers
under the direction of Abramovitz, who
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had been made Harrison's deputy di-
rector of planning. "It's never a picnic
when several creative minds are brought
together to work on one project,"
Abramovitz says. "The rivalry for in-
dividual credit is always hovering over
things. It can be ruinous. We were
determined that the U.N. was going to
represent an authentic group effort.
That was the reason Wally declarea the
drafting room out-of-bounds?to pre-
vent any member from getting his own
idea drawn up into one of the plans be-
fore the rest of the members had a
chance to pass on it. All ideas went into
one common pot. All sketches were un-
signed. That way, everything that was
sent to the drafting room came from
the group as a whole."
During the first two months, the
board of design chugged along at a
steady clip. "It was an exhilarating ex-
perience," Robertson, the British mem-
ber, has since said. "When we started,
each of us had his own pet idea of what
the whole project or some part of it
should look like. Liang proposed that
the Secretariat be built on an axis run-
ning due east and west. The important
buildings in China had always been built
that way, he told us. It insured good
luck. Liang also thought the entire site
should be enclosed by a wall. Antoni-
ades couldn't sec any virtue in a wall.
He preferred a continuous colonnade.
You see, a good many of our concepts
were quite atavistic. I was the court-
yard fiend, which was proper for an
Englishman, I suppose. Cormier, the
Canadian, was for the conservative,
solid, Anglo-French approach. And
Le Corbusier, of course, was for Le
Corbusier. He wanted the headquar-
ters group to be one gigantic terraced
block raised on stilts, or pi/otis?
Corbu's trademark. Bassov detested
stilts. 'Chicken legs!' he'd snort. 'No-
kay The design he had in mind was
something like that of a power plant.
That's how it went. But all of us gradu-
ally subdued our personal vanities and
gave up the preconceived visions we'd
come with, and as the project took
shape the feeling of group unity grew.
This was very noticeable to me. I went
back to England for a couple of weeks,
and when I returned I found the
members of the hoard had knitted to-
gether into a sort of architectural jury.
Each individual was still expected to
express himself without reservation, but
he was also expected to abide by the
groumerdict, and not go into any tan-
trums. Harrison was what you might
call the foreman of the jury. The im-
portant thing to bear in mind is that
Wally Harrison never submitted a de-
sign of his own. That's what made
Wally's position so strong."
In late April, a mild crisis occurred.
Some of the delegates, with 1,c Cor-
busier as their self-appointed spokesman,
favored having all the lounges and the
committee and council rooms in the
Conference Building on one floor, while
the rest favored having them on two
floors, one right above the other, to
make everything more compact. The ?
debate reached its climax when Le Cor-
busier read a prepared statement con-
sisting of thirty-six points. A number of
these supported his single-level thesis,
hut some of the members found others
weirdly irrelevant, such as Point 6: "I
was sent by the French to defend the
ideas of modern architecture and am
responsible to the world at large for
(a) undisputed function and (b) cer-
tain beauty," and Point 3 I : "Architec-
tural splendor comes from the great
books." In essence, Le Corhusier's
statement amounted to a request for a
vote on the two schemes. Harrison an- ?
swered it at the next meeting. "There
can be a decision by a vote, or I can
make the decision," he told the Mem-
bers. "I have explained the difficulty
of a vote: After a vote, you have the
winners and the losers. If I make the
decision, I am the only loser." He then
recommended further study of the '
problem, but when the stalemate con- .
tinued and there seemed no other solu-
tion, he ruled in favor of the two-level
scheme, on the ground. that while it was
a little less beautiful, it would provide
a little more convenience. It was the
only time that Harrison ever exercised
the final authority that was his as chair-
man of the hoard.
This brief squall over, the members
quickly pushed ahead again, and in mid-
May, less than three months after the
start of the deliberation, a final plan
was unanimously agreed upon?a feat
of collaborative international design
comparable to the four-minute mile.
The plan was then presented to the
Headquarters Advisory Committee of
the General Assembly which unani-
mously approved it on May 21st. In
November, the General Assembly for-
mally accepted the plan, and excavation
of the site was started on September 14,
1948. Perhaps the most significant, or
at any rate the most exuberant, footnote
to the life and tunes of the board of de-
sign was a five-hundred-word state-
ment, entitled "A Declaration," that Le
Corbusier released to the press shortly
before it was dishamled. "A wonderful
result has been achieved and one that
is worth noting: we are all of the same
opinion," it read, in part. "To those
outside who question IN we can reply:
we are united, we are a team, the World
Tram of the United Nations laying
dovvn the. plans of world architec-
tiffe.... IVe are a homogeneous block.
There are no Ila riles attached to this
work.... Each of us can be legitimate-
ly proud of having been called upon to
work in this team, and that should be
sufficient for us," It it-as sufficient for
Le Corbusier for a time, but a year
later, with his rambunctiiius ego once
again in the ascendant, he began-claim-
ing credit for the whole plan, and was
miffed when officials of the United Na-
tions would not arrange a press con-
ference at which he. could elaborate on
this theme. lie had, however, in the
(pinion of his colleagues on the hoard,
made a considerable contribution, of
which, in his own words, he could be
legitimately proud.
ON the southwestern corner of the
United Nations site, near the
junction of First Avenue aml Forty-
second Street, ,there stood, and still
stands, a six-story concrete building of
no particular architectural distinction
that was nearing completion at the time
the U.N. acquired the site and was orig-
inally in to provide office space
for the New York City Housing Au-
thority. During their deliberations in the
spring of 1 947, the members of the
hoard of design briefly discussed the
question of whether to raze this brand-
new building, which would have to be
bought from the city in any event,_ or
try to work it into the scheme of things
as best they could. They ended up by
tossing the problem into flarrison's lap.
I lis decision was to keep it. Nowadays, if
the subject of this stepchild, which is
currently serving as the United Nations
library, happens to come up, Harrison
is likely to frown and to confess that he
has concluded it was a mistake to leave
the building standing; he considers it a
jarring note in the otherwise architec-
turally harmonious headquarters. Actu-
ally, at the time Harrison decided not to
raze the building, he could hardly have
decided otherwise, for the. problem arose
just when Secretary-General Lie was
diligently paring his proposed budget for
the headquarters, in an e 'fort to per-
suade Congress to lend the U.N. the
money to build it. In the course of three
fruitless months of tri Mg to round
up funds, during which he had been
turned down cold by the International
Hank, Lie had already appealed once
to Congress for eighty-five million
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dollars?and had met with no success;
now he was asking for only sixty-five
million, and on August llth, Congress
granted the loan. The U.N. had to pay
the City of New York about a million
and a hall for the Housing Authority
Building, and Harrison felt that the ad-
ditional- money that would be needed to
tear it down could be better spent'else-
where. The building served for some
time as a base of operations for the
Headquarters Planning Office and, aS
Ilarrison frequently points out, what-
ever its architectural shortcomings, it
was ideal for this purpose, since it was
not only right on the site but, unlike any
other available building that would have
provided equal facilities, remarkahly
handy to several restaurants on or near
Second Avenue., .such as the Imperialc,
Colombo's, and the Palm, where, he
finds, the easygoing atmosphere does
wonders for a man whose head is too
full of girders, spandrels, beams, and
the ultimate failing point of steel.
Lie engaged Ilarrison & Abramovitz
to convert the international board's
plans into drawings for the contrac-
tors?a choice that was far from unex-
pected., since the firm was already so
closely linked to the project. This put
Harrison, the director of planning, in
the bizarre position of being the client of
Harrison, of Harrison & Ahramovitz.
"Ile was very tough on himself,"
II. L. McLeod, who headed the finance
department of the I leadquarters Plan-
ning Office, said later. "An architec-
tural firm doing a job such as Harrison
and Abramowitz did for the U.N. build-
ings would ordinarily charge a fee of
several million dollars. Harrison &
Ahramovitz insisted on doing the. job
for just cost plus the actual overhead.
They didn't make a cent of profit."
If there was any one day during the
construction of the Headquarters that
stood out as crucial for Harrison and
his staff, it was the twenty-fifth of No-
vember, 1950. Around nine o'clock on
the morning- of that day- --a Saturday
a hurricane blew into the New York
area from the southeast and ripped full
force up the Fast River. Harrison raced
from his home on Fifth Avenue, near
Sixty-fourth Street, to the half-finished
Secretariat. Ile was soon joined there by
three other members of his staff who
were deeply involved in the project
--
Mel ,cod, Glenn II. Bennett, and James
A. Dawson and by Byron Price, the
Assistant Secretary-General who was
working with the Headquarters Plan-
ning Oflice. "It was a real storm,"
Dawson has since said. "About thirty
?Ards in front of the Secretariat stood
a platform used for mixing concrete.
It was around twelve feet by twenty,
and made of two-inch planks. Well,
the hurricane lifted that platform up
out of the mud and right into the air
, like a toy, and almost tossed it against
the building. It dropped a couple of
yards short of where we were standing,
- right at the entrance. A little later,
Harrison and Price and the rest of us
went up on the roof to see if we could
measure the sway. \Are didn't have a
level with us, so we used the crudest of
all measuring devices; we dripped a
paper match into a puddle of water and
watched how much it moved?really
the same as the bubble-in-water princi-
ple: By our computations, the Secretar-
iat was performing beautifully; she
wasn't swaying any more than three-
quarters of an inch. Wu doubled the fig-
ure!, to he on the safe side, but that's still
darn good, you know." Harrison, who
was also worried about how the vast ex-
panse of glass on the Secretariat's east
side. would hold up (it Ali(l), remained
at the site until well after dark, when
the storm finally blew itself out. "It
was a pretty rough day for me," he
said later. "Every time you get a build-
ing up, there's always one day when
? the full consciousness of your resp)(nsi-
? bilitv as an architect hits you. It's the
day when -the building has to work.
This was it."
The Secretariat was finished first,
then the Conference Building, and,
the General Assembly. In the
summer of 1950, when the last two
buildings were still far from completed,
Harrison and his staff suddenly found
themselves faced with thc problem of
inflation resulting from the outbreak of
war in Korea. Tye? years earlier, in
lining up its sources of construction ma-
terials, the Headquarters Planning Of-
fice had contracted to bury its struc-
tural steel from the American Bridge
Division of the United States Steel
Corporation, and Benjamin Fairless,
the corporation's president, had agreed
to give the United Nations "preferential
treatment." Delivery dates on steel at
that time were ordinarily from twelve
to sixteen months alter the receipt of
an order, hut Fairless guaranteed liar-
05011 delivery within six MilrIthS.
? the war in Korea began, and steel be-
came even harder to get than before,
Fairless stood by his gatarantee, and
most of the other companies supplying
materials to the United Nations came
through in the same manner, but the
cost of steel and other building materials
rose sharply- --an average of around
twenty per cent and this threw Oh
,losely figured budget of the 'Head-
quarters Planning Office badly out of
kilter. Lie succeeded in negotiating an
additional loan of three million dollars
rhorn Congress, butt from there on it was
up to Ilarrison to scale down the. origi-
nal plans as best he could to complete
the project without exceeding the total
appropriation of sixty-eight million dol-
lars. This meant some fairly drastic
changes. Four committee rooms were
eliminated from the Conference Build-
ing, and the General Assembly was re-
designed no fewer than nine times, each
design being more economical than the
one before. As originally conceived, the
General Assembly was to have been a
thin-waisted structure with an assembly
hall at either end; now one of the
two halls had to he abandoned, a
lounge area for the delegates was
chopped in half, the height of the ceil-
ing of the remaining hall was dropped
fifteen feet, and the length of the north
lobby was diminished by some twenty
feet?.3 loss that, in Harrison's eyes,
severely impaired the looks of the en-
trance. All along the line, less expen-
sive. materials were substituted for the
ones specified in the early plans?ter-
razzo and carpeting for marble floor-
ing, fabric for wood on the walls of
set era 1 Cinninince rooms, marbleized
glass for marble, and so on. "Wally was
very ingenious about it all," Michael
IIarris, a member of I larrison's execu-
tive staff, said later. "For instance, there
wits the matter of some columns in the
lobby of the Assembly. They were to
be made of concrete, and we'd been
planning to cover them with plaster in-
: stead of the marble facing originally
called for. When ?Vally saw how the
? columns shaped up in concrete, he told
'Forget the plaster. NVe can save
a little dough here. We'll just paint
the concrete.' "
'iii October, 1952, four years and
Hine month after construction began,
the General Assembly Building was
co impleted and the job was done. Count-
ing the funds set aside for the landscap-
ing of the site, the total cost 11:1(1 been
sixty-seven million five hundred thou-
sand dollars.
R( )U0\
nine' ii chick one \Ioluul;my
11100111110. early this fall, Ilarrisoin
merited in town from his country place
at Huntington, Long Island, and madc
for his office, in Rockefeller Center,
Ill a state of lug h gnod humor. Mc
had niq shunt the. kind of weekend he
thrives on. At Iluntington, he bad read
a nit sten by Ellen. Queen, one of his
Livorite contemporary writers, and hd-
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anced this with some poems by Dylan ;
Thomas, whose 'rich, tumbling Ian- ;
gunge fascinates him. He had enjoyed
a first-class argument on the future
shape Of the City of New York with
one of his favorite conversational spar-
ring partners, Robert Moses, who has:
a place in nearby Babylon. On Satur-
day evening, he and Mrs. Harrison had
entertained a fairly large group at din-
ner, and during the meal he had in-
stigated the sending of a cablegram
to Fernand Leger?whose professed
Communism none of his old associates
take very seriously?congratulating him
on the opening of a new exhibition and
signed "Your capitalist friends." In ad-
dition, Harrison had worked for some
time on an abstract painting he has been
trying to finish for two years, pruned
some fruit trees on his property, and put
in three reviving hours sketching a
brighi, lively design for a new combina-
tion office building and opera hotise that
may or may not go up someday on
Broadway at Sixty-fourth Street.
Upon reaching his office, Harrison
whipped through his mail in ten min-
utes, spent a half hour cleaning out a
closet with Vinnic, the firm's general :
factotum, and went over his sketches for
.the opera house with AbramoVitz, and
then the two partners discussed pltns.
fin- an office building that the Com-
mercial Investment Trust expects to
erect on Madison Avenue, between
Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets. Pres-
ently, a young architect from theH
Middle West arrived to keep an ap-
pointment with Harrison, and in the ?
ensuing chitchat it developed that the ,
visitor .had not yet seen the United
Nations Headquarters. Harrison rare-
ly visits the United Nations these days
unless some maintenance problem there
calls for his attention or he wants ,to
talk over with Lie's successor, Dag
lammarskjahl, the touchy business of
accepting or rejecting gifts of art prof-
fered by member nations, but on this
morning he impulsively offered to take
the young man over and show him
around. The offer being eagerly accept-
ed, Harrison slapped on a narrow-
brimmed brown felt hat he once picked
. up in Oslo, and the two men beaded for
the street, whereilarrison hailed a taxi.
"The United Nations Headquarters,.
skipper," he said to the driver, who,
nodded and swung into the stream of
traffic. As the cab made its way across
town, Harrison said he felt that Ne
York needed a club to supplement the
present Architectural League by pro-
viding a comfortable, natural gathering
place for painters, sculptors, and archii
tects, as the Cafe de Fiore does in Paris,
and then turned to discuss the increas-
ingly important role that he believes
optics will play in the architecture of
the future. "Since Cezanne, painters
have studied every possible method of
intensifying the human being's reac-
tion to the forms depicted on flat sur-
faces," he said. "In architecture, we're
dealing with the same problem. What
is the -effect on .the little guy when
he looks at a building, or walks through
it, or lives in it? How do we intensify
his visual experience by simplifying form
and color? No architect of the future
will be any good unless he's a painter
and a sculptor, too." ?
When the two men reached the
Headquarters site, Harrison took his
companion for a stroll around the
grounds. "We were talking about
optics," he said. "Well, see that little
break up there?" He pointed to the
top of the Secretariat, where the mar-
l& framing along the sides is slightly
recessed. "We did that to pull the
building in at the top. You know how
the Greeks and Romans used to build
their , walls slanting inward, so that
the buildings wouldn't look top-heavy?
We couldn't do that here, of course?
the Secretariat is too high?SO we
stepped in those sides instead." Har-
rison turned, and his eye fell on the
old New York City Housing Au-
thority Building that is now the li-
brary. He sighed. "That was sure a
mistake, leaving that building up," he
said. "It doesn't fit at all. But it's a
complicated story, and anyway it's too
late now." A few yards farther on, he
came to a sudden halt. "1.she corner of
that neck over there," he said, waving a
hand toward the narrow, rectangular
passageway that connects the General
Assembly with the Conference Build-
ing. "You've probably heard a hundred
and one criticisms of these Headquar-
ters buildings, but somehow no one has
ever jumped on that neck. I don't
know how they missed it. It's not
right?not right at all." The two men
entered the Secretariat Building, and
Harrison led the way down a back stair-
case. "If anyone was looking for some-
thing to criticize, that neck is certainly
lousy," he said as he guided his com-
panion into a subbasement, two stories
below street level, where a battery of
clerks were sorting mail. "This ceiling
should have been at least a fou higher,
too," he continued in a mournful tone.
"None of us realized that those over-
head pipes would take up so much space.
It doesn't give the guys enough room."
'Fhe tour moved on briskly?a brief
Approved For Release 2002/08/21 : CIA-RDP80601676R004100060048-1
examination of the twenty-third floor,
which is a typical service floor, housing
elevator, air-conditioning, and ventilat-
ing machinery, on to several office floors,
then earthward by elevator and escala-
tor and into the Conference Building,
with its three council 'chambers, its nu-
merous committee rooms and lounges,
and its two restaurants, and finally,
via the offensive neck, to the General
.Assembly Building. For the most
.part, Harrison was content to point
out things that "we might have done
-better," but he was openly pleased when
the young architect expressed his ad-
miration for certain features of the
:buildings, such as the movable partitions
in the Secretariat, which make it possible
to rearrange the whole layout of a
floor in a couple of days, and the para-
bolic sweep of the walls of the Assembly
Hall, which gives an effect of intimacy
to a domed auditorium that is only a
little smaller than the Radio City Music
Hall.
At the end of the tour, I larrison and
his companion stood at the curb on
.First Avenue, waiting for a cab.
."There'll be one aloniz in a minute,"
,Harrison said. "Six ye:11-s ago, there
;wouldn't have been one in half an hour
:in this part of town. I don't suppose you
noticed when we got in the taxi coming
'over that the driver knew right away
.where the United Nations was. Prob-
ably seemed to you the most natural
thing in the world. But, silly as it may
sound, that always makes me feel
igood?I mean the fact that the cab-
:drivers all know now where the United
1Nations is. Hell, back in '48, when we
were starting the U.N., none of them
iknew what we were talking about."
?HERBERT WARREN WIND
(This is the last of three articles
on Mr. Harrison.)
?
Dr. Frank Willard Libby, the newly-
appointed scientist member of the Atomic
Energy Commission, is known as the in-
ventor of the "atomic time clock," a de-
vice by which he has been able to deter-
-mine the ages of objects up to 20,000 years
old. This device will be used in Egypt as
well.... -
Thus it will he possible to determine
the age of the mammies in Egypt.
?lleiritt (Lebanon) Star.
The red-hot ones?
?
? NON-SEQUITUR DEPARTMENT
[From the Springfield (Mass.) News]
[he custom of using mint sauce with
? lamb is very old as indicated by the follow-
ing verse from a medieval era:
"Always have lobster sauce with salm-
on."
I_______Prrotiselease200itliirliPtift-TRDP8013016761iGUTO
NDER WILL CIRCLE CLASSIFICATION TOP AND BOTTOM)
?
4*
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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Director of Central Intelligence
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Actg. Asst. Director, C&D
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Remarks:
Routed to you, at the DD/Ifs suggestion,
profile sketch of Wallace Harrison who will
the architect for CIA's new building.
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