SPAN: March 1965

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OF EVENTS MARCH 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rode from the White House to the U.S. Capitol in Washington to take the Presidential oath for the second time. Civil war had raged for four years, and the divided nation had suffered the agonies of death and destruction in the bloodiest conflict ever fought on the North American continent. In August of J 864 Lincoln had expected defeat in the November elections, but major Union victories and the gradual destruction of the Southern armies had assured his election victory. On March 4, 1865, military victory was in sight: One Southern army had been destroyed, another was being decimated; one Union army was marching unopposed through the Southern States of North and South Carolina to join a second Union army attacking the Southern capital at Richmond, Virginia. In the photograph at right, Lincoln (arrow) is seen reading his Second Inaugural Address in which he outlined the policy that he intended to follow towards the defeated Southern States once hostilities were ended. An appreciation of this eloquent, historic plea for compassion appears on page 29, "The Heritage of Lincoln."

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CONTENTS MARCH

FOR VOLUME

1965

ARCHITECTURE

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IN TRANSITION

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by Wolf Van Eckardt

'A PERFECTLY BEAUTIFUL

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BUILDING'

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V(!>/A

by Edward Durell Stone

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7

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AN AMERICAN ARCHITECT IN INDIA

12

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by Kenneth C. Wimmel

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TRENDS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE

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SCHOOLS OF TODAY AND TOMORROW.:A:,C'',,,

21

by V S, Nanda

AMERICA'S POSJW AR FICTION by Ihab Hassan

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THE HERITAGE OF LINCOLN by Milton

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'CODE 99': A MAN IS DYING ItM~c""

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'MY FAIR LADY' COMES TO INDIA by Bosley Crowther

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PHILADELPHIA:

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A XITY REJUVENATED

by David B. Carlson

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COVER: U.S. Embassy, New Delhi, designed by Edward Stone, was first to be completed under new policy to commission leading architects to design buildings for its embassies. Photo by Avinash Pasricha. See page 7. BACK COVER: Architect's drawing board symbolizes planning and design of the "Second United States" now taking shape across the country. Articles on role of architects engaged in this creative effort begin on page 2. FRONT

EDITORIAL STAFF: Lokenath Bhattacharya, K. G. Gabrani, Avinash Pasricha, Nirma/ Kumar Sharma. ART STAFF: B. Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Kafya/. PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICES: USIS Photo Lab. Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Published by United States Information Service, Bahawa/pur House, Sikandra Road, New De/hi-I, 011 behalf of The American Embassy, New De/hi. Printed by Arul1 K. Mehta af Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I. Pages 17 to 20 and 29 to 32 printed by offset at G. Claridge & Co., Caxton Works, Frere Road, Bombay-I.

2, 3.

Periodicity of its Publication Printer's Name Nationality Address

4.

Publisher's Name Nationality Address

5,

Editor's Name Nationality Address

6.

Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital.

I, William H. WeatherJby, hereby the be.! of my knowledge and belief.

declare

that

United State1 Information Savict, Bahawalpur House, Sikal1dra Road, New Delhl-I Monthly Awn K. Mehta Indian Vakil & Sons Private Ltd" Naranda. Building, Sprolt Road, 18 Ballard E.tat., Bombay-I William H. Weathe"by Am~rican Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Del/,I-I Dean K. Brown American Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhl-! The Goyernmenf of the Unirtd Staus of America

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WILLIAM H. WEATHERSBY, Signatur. of Publb/tt,


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ARCHITECTURE IN TRANSITION "

EVOLUTION of architectural expression-a restless search for new form and new building techniques-is the predominant characteristic of architecture in the United States today. This search, carried on with almost frantic, yet vital and positive creativity, coincides with the greatest building boom the country has ever experienced. Economists estimate that, to meet the foreseeable demand for new buildings of all kinds, the people of the United States will have to construct as much again before this century runs out as they have built in their entire history as a nation. Architects and planners therefore speak of building a "Second United States." There are two reasons for this hectic construction work which keeps bulldozers roaring, pile drivers clanging, and cement mixers whirling in one continuous din from one end of the country to the other. One reason is the rapid population increase which creates an insatiable demand for more housing, more schools, more hospitals and more places for work, leisure and worship. The other is the need to replace obsolete buildings and entire urban areas. Some of them, badly neglected and overcrowded, have been allowed to deteriorate into unsanitary slums which are now being cleared and rebuilt. Many other buildings, no more than thirty or forty years old, are still sound and in good condition, but no longer economical. The design of these "Second United States" is largely in the hands of some 28,000 registered architects working together with engineers of all kinds as well as with professional city planners and other specialists. Most architects work independently-in fact, about ninety per cent of them either have their own offices or are in partnership with other architects or with engineers. Only a few are employed either by the Federal or State governments or by large corporations which do a great deal of building or produce building materials. Some architectural offices are one-man enterprises. But building design and building technology have become so complex

A

RAPID

in recent years that most offices have a staff of draftsmen, engineers, specification writers and various other specialists for the different phases of building. There are a few giant architectural firms-such as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with 1,000 employees working from branch offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. But huge firms are the exception. The average architectural office has about seven permanent staff members and calls on various specialists and consultants as needed. Most offices give their client not just blueprints for his building but assist him with the site selection and the efficient planning and organization of all the activities that are to take place in the building. The American architect is required by his professional code to work only as an independent professional in the sole, best interest of his client. He is trained during a minimum of five years of specialized study in one of the country's seventy-seven architectural schools or colleges. This is followed by at least three years of practical apprenticeship. Only then can he apply for the State examination which he must pass to practise architecture. Reflecting a rapidly changing society and continuing technological advance, American architecture is today in a state of constant and rapid change. It is impossible to tell what physical shape or form the "Second United States" will take-if, indeed, American architecture ever settles down to any style as conveniently discernible as Gothic or Baroque. Only a few years ago, it seemed as though what some architectural critics called the "international style" would dominate the American scene. Lever House on New York's Park Avenue was generally considered one of the finest American manifestations of that style. Its twenty-one-storey tower of blue-green glass reflects the ever-changing sky and the kaleidoscope of the surrounding metropolis. This elegant slab rests on a slim horizontal base which, in turn, is lithely raised above ground on Continued on page 5


Yamasaki's MacGregor Memorial Centre, Detroit. 4

SPAN

March 1965

Le Corbusier's Punjab High Court building at Chandigarh.


An unrelenting search for new forms and new building techniques is the predominant characteristic of American architecture

today.

stainless steel columns. Aside from the United Nations Secretariat, it was the first glass curtain wall skyscraper of the utterly simple design pioneered years earlier by the Swiss-born Frenchman Le Corbusier and the German-born American Mies van der Rohe. Saarinen's General Motors Technical Centre, located in the open country on Michigan's vast, flat expanse, applied the same severe, glassy "international style" horizontally. The most frequently cited example of the style, however, is the house Philip Johnson designed for himself at New Canaan, Connecticut. Built in 1949, it is a chaste glass box which carries Mies's dictum, "less is more," to its most extreme. It has been praised in almost lyrical terms by architectural critics everywhere. Soon thereafter similar buildings of steel and glass were appearing all over the United States, in all kinds of surroundings and climates and for all kinds of purposes. The earlier enthusiasm began to cool. Many critics now voiced the fear that American architecture would freeze into the cold and ubiquitous monotony of "glass cages." Lewis Mumford termed the plain, glassy slab office towers which rose in one American city after another "human filing cases." Architects joined the criticism. Today the same critics warn against too much architectural variety and exuberance. For in the intervening decade a host of new, flowing and often sinuously sculptural structures of reinforced concrete have been rising all over the country. Saarinen's Dulles Airport terminal is just one example. His TWA (Trans World Airline) terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, completed in 1962, is even more expressionistically sculptural. Inside and out the high-speed curves of this structure swoop all around, creating an infinite and restless variety of enclosures flowing into each other. The first of these reinforced thin shell structures on American soil-parabolic in plan, section and elevation-was the North Carolina State Fair Pavilion at Raleigh of 1953, designed by the late, brilliant Polish-American architect Mathew Nowick and built by William Henry Detrick. The most famous, though not necessarily the most successful, of such free-form structures is Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. The cone-shaped building vividly expresses the spiralling ramp inside its exterior shape. It was completed six months after the master died in April 1959. But it is not only such tours-de-force for "monumental" purposes which have broken the rigid geometric simplicity of the "international style." A new romantic and decorative spirit has seized all American architecture. The ever-increasing use of elastic, mouldable concrete-as opposed to rigid, angular steel-results in new, sculptural shapes and forms if not for the entire building, at least for supports of facades. The play of light and shadow, rich textures and patterns and sweeping curves are again coming into their own with little, if any, restraint. A building is no longer conceived as the simplest, most straightforward envelope to shelter whatever different activities go on inside. On the contrary, the structure's interior organization and spaces are now often outwardly expressed with such unabashed Continued on next page


boldness that critics speak of architectural "brutalism." A tame and pleasing example of such expressive reinforced concrete architecture is Washington's Arena Stage, completed in 1961 and designed by the young Chicago architect and planner Harry Weese. It shelters a small theatre-in-the-round and, in a separate but connected building, a generous lobby where people gather at intermission time to talk, drink coffee, and look at paintings on exhibit. The Arena's particular form and design could only serve its own unique purpose. The proposed new City Hall for Boston by Gerhard M. Kallman, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles, the result of a national competition, is far more massively brazen. These young architects have piled together the various interior spaces-large public halls, various size offices, stairways, corridors and whatever-like so many building blocks in a seemingly haphazard manner. Inside the arrangement is eminently practical. On the outside, however, the random arrangement of the blocks and supports, the solids and voids, makes an odd, abstract pattern. Strongly reminiscent ofLe Corbusier's brawny and rough-hewn architecture at Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, the design appears deliberately primitivea protest against the highly polished machine art of Lever House, General Motors Technical Centre or the Philip Johnson house. Yet this same rebellion against the monotony of polished machine art architecture has also resulted in the graceful elegance of Anshen and Allen's new gilded office tower, the International Building, in San Francisco; Minoru Yamasaki's MacGregor Memorial Community Conference Centre and his Reynolds Metals Company Building in Detroit, and the recent work of Edward D. Stone, notably his U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. These buildings and many others like them have blossomed forth in the past few years with a decorative exuberance and gaiety which often rivals the lacy Venetian Gothic.

Mystically mediaeval and decidedly romantic in SpIrIt IS the latest work of Louis Kahn, a Philadelphia architect, born on the island of Osel in Estonia. His most famous building to date is the Alfred Newton Richards Medical Building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. "It is principled, vigorous, fundamental and exhilarating; it states, teaches and questions," one critic has written. The building appears as a cluster of" tall, narrowly spaced brick shafts which surround and support a number of closely huddled cubic enclosures of glass, whose cement floors and square columns make a bold, angular pattern. The design expresses Kahn's distinction between "master" and "servant" areas. The stark, towering stacks house the "servant" areas-animal quarters, toilets, mains to carry water, gas and vacuum lines, as well as heat and air-conditioning ducts. The glass-enclosed laboratories, or "master" spaces, are thus entirely unencumbered, open "studios" for concentrated scientific work. Such is the prolific variety of architectural creations in recent years, that Lewis Mumford now gloomily warns that too much such "technical facility, such aesthetic audacity, poured forth on a large scale, promises only to enlarge the domain of chaos." What is happening is, of course, not uniquely American but part of a world-wide development. Architecture in general, and not just one style, has become international and its currents and cross-currents of technical innovation and aesthetic thought sweep across national boundaries. Pier Luigi Nervi's intricate calculations of stresses and tension in thin shell reinforced concrete engineering in Italy, Kenzo Tange's latest building in Japan, or Oscar Niemeyer's latest design in Brazil may inspire an American architect as much as an ingenious new building across the street from his office, engineered and designed by fellow-Americans. The reverse. of course, is equally true. •


Inspired by examples ofMoghul architecture,

Edward

Durell

Stone blended Western concepts

f:\ PERFECTLY BEAUTIFUL BUILDING' with Oriental tradition in his unique design of the American Embassy building in New Delhi. N MY JOURNEY to the East I sketched the United States Embassy in India, which the State Department had asked me to design. One of these sketches on an envelope, which was rescued from the wastebasket, was the basis for the final design. Some months earlier, Lee King, director of Foreign Building Operations for the State Department, had made an historic departure from precedent in commissioning government architecture. He appointed an objective board consisting of Henry R. Shepley, Ralph Walker and Pietro Belluschi to advise the State Department on the selection of architects purely on the basis of performance. These men were also to guide the architect in the carrying out of the commissions. This principle of empowering objective professionals to choose architects for government projects successfullyremoved architecture from politics for the first Continued on page 9

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Architect Edward Stone, above, based his final design of the Chancery building upon this roughly drawn sketch, on an envelope, below, which was rescued from a wastepaper basket.

Reprinted by permiSSIOn of publisher, Horizon Press, Inc., New York 10, from The Evolution of an Architect. Š 1962.

Above, gilded Great Seal of U.S. is suspended from top of main entrance to Chancery building. Below, aerial view of Embassy buildings, foreground, includes Chancery and Roosevelt House.


Reflection of the Chancery in the front circular lagoon, above. The building's pebbled platform, slender steel columns finished with gold leaf, and mosaic grille exterior, left. Water garden inside the building, below right and left, studded with a cluster of islands of tropical trees and plants, adds cooling effect.


Elegant,

functional,

cally Indian,

basi-

Stone's

Em-

The Embassy represents a building type, a temple, as old as history. bassy design has the dynamism of modern architecture. time. It has revolutionized government architecture overseas. The Board issued a very wise directive for the guidance of the architect. It included this paragraph: "To the sensitive and imaginative designer it will be an invitation to give serious study to local conditions of climate and site, to understand and sympathize with local customs and people ... yet he will not fear using new techniques or new materials should these constitute real advances in architectural thinking." Our Embassy in New Delhi, was the first project to be guided by this directive and I took it very seriously. First I decided to place the structure on a platform or podium under which automobiles could be sheltered from the 120 degree sun of India. Also-let's be frank-I wanted to keep them out of sight. The. idea of a monumental building rising from:a sea of multi-coloured, tailfinned automobiles is simply revolting. I elected to place the offices on two storeys around a water garden to gain the cooling effect of the fountains and pool. To shade windows and other glass Continued

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All grille work such as this, above, was fabricated on site. Ducks and other waterfowl live in the water garden, below.

A t reception lounge VIsitors are greeted by receptionist, above. Offices such as Ihis, below, are aroun1 the water garden.

on page 11

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JOSEPH

ALLEN

STEIN

AN AMERICAN ARCHITECT IN IND/AIn his twelve-year stay in India, Joseph Allen Stein has designed buildings for a variety of purposes-schools, art centres, low-cost houses and factories. In character, his works reflect the changing mood in Indian BY KENNETH PHOTOGRAPHS

C.

WIMMEL

BY RAGHUBIR

SINGH

visitor to the office of Joseph Allen Stein and Associates asked the American architect which was his favourite among the buildings he had designed in India, he paused and thought for a moment, then said, "I guess the one I'm working on now." It was a fair answer. In the course of his career as an architect both in the United States and India, Joseph Stein has designed many buildings for a variety of purposes. To choose, for example, between a graceful building for school of art and music, and a simple, almost stark factory, is impossible. Both are suited for widely divergent purposes. When Stein came to India twelve years ago from a successful architectural career in the United States, it was to teach rather than to practise his profession. But in the course of three years' teaching at the Bengal Engineering College of the University of Calcutta, the idea of working in India captured his imagination. His teaching assignment completed, he decided to stay in India and establish a firm. Today, Joseph Allen Stein and Associates is.one of the busiest architectural firms in India. Like his designs, Stein's office is simple and functional. Tucked away on the third floor of an office building in Delhi, it contains a desk and a few chairs. On the walls are displayed drawings of buildings, some completed, some yet to be built. In one corner is a model of the American International School in New Delhi. And like his office, Stein is an unpretentious man who prefers discussing his work to talking about himself. He smiles frequently and chooses his words carefully as he describes his experiences in adapting his ideas to India.

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Essentially modern architecture today.

ECENTLY, WHEN A

While emphasizing that conditions in the two countries differ, Stein noted that some of his buildings in India could easily be built in the United States without many modifications. To illustrate his point, he indicates a drawing of the new Indian Express Building in Bombay. It is a tall, modern office building that looks little different from modern buildings in Paris, London or New York. "There is really no reason to want to look different," Stein explains. "It is an office building-air-conditionedand it has the problems of resistance to wind and rain, the problem of getting people into the building and up to the offices, the problem of fire protection and light and ventilationin fact, all the structural problems that go into such a building. These are universal problems." However, it also has certain problems peculiar to Bombay and these are also reflected in the design, as example the high humidity and a location facing the storms from the Ocean. But even these conditions are not unique to Bombay or India. However, in other areas such as housing or site planning and even in use of materials large differences do exist and these need to find expression in design. Stein can speak knowledgeably of conditions in the u.S. and India, since he has worked in both countries and acquired firsthand experience in each. Before coming to this country the fifty-two-year-old architect, born in Nebraska and educated in America and France, had already gained a reputation for his novel ideas and techniques. From 1937 to 1945 he worked in architectural firms in New York and Los Angeles and, later, moved to San Francisco, California, to begin his career as an independent practising architect.




To be truly meaningful to its times, architecture should be a "concept of human destiny."

The circular structures of the American International School permit a number of activities to take place in a single room.

Graceful and refreshingly new in design Triveni Kala Sangam is fronted by green lawn, a pool and bright heds of flowers. Escorts factory, Faridabad, is one of Stein's recent projects. The design would suit the same purpose in California or Texas.

leave room for the lawn, flower beds, and a small pool which contribute so much to the beauty of the building. In another part of New Delhi, in a beautiful setting surrounded by Lodi Gardens, is the India International Centre designed by Stein. An institution devoted to furthering international understanding through the study of the cultures of many lands, the Centre derives its support from universities all over India as well the Rockefeller Foundation and from individual members. It houses facilities for conferences and research and a hostel with single and double rooms for sixtyfour guests. In addition, there is a library with a capacity for 12,000volumes, an air-conditioned auditorium seating 250, and a conference room with facilities for simultaneous translations into six languages. The Centre consists of two long buildings connected by a covered terrace. Much larger than Triveni Kala Sangam, it is situated on a spacious plot which allows ample room for pools, fountains, gardens and lawns. Everything in the Centre is modem, from the stainless steel kitchen to the individual air-conditioning controls in each guest room. Though the basic building materials are Indian, the interior appointments accent its international flavour-glassware from France, kitchenware from Britain, air-conditioning plant from the United States. Yet with all its international modernity, the Centre allows the visitor to enjoy the architectural beauties of ancient India in which Delhi abounds: and it is conceded that it fits in gracefully and harmoniously with the ancient Lodi Tombs directly behind the Centre. In contrast to the basically rectangular buildings of the International Centre are the circular structures of the American International School in the Chanakyapuri area of New Delhi. Stein chose a circular design for the school buildings, he says, because "the site is small, when originally planned only about six acres-twenty-five per cent of what would be normal for a school of that size. If you put two rectangles together, they fill the space and the area between them tends to be cramped. If you use circular forms in the same limited area, the restricted space flows out into the open space and vice-versa." One result of the circular design is the shape of the classrooms. They are wedge-shaped, like slices of a pie, allowing maximum exposure to light and air. This shape also permits a number of activities to take place in one room without groups of students disturbing one another. The school is set on the rocky ridge which runs through New Delhi, and the buildings nestle among large boulders which are strewn over the area. Stein explains that the site provided an interesting architectural challenge. "Here we had an irregular and not very attractive site. But still, like any piece of the world that has not been obliterated by man, it had potential. One of the most interesting problems in architecture is to try to find what is potential." Stein's architecture, therefore, aims at placing man in the true perspective of his surroundings. Any architecture or planning to be effective and meaningful to its times, has to be a "concept of human destiny," he says. Driving down Mathura Road through Faridabad a short distance outside Delhi, Stein points to the empty fields stretching out on both sides. "In ten years," he says, "this road will be lined with factories. It will be a busy, bustling place. That is the challenge of India." •


Scarcity of labour and abundance of material have encouraged American architectural trends towards machine production. But mass fabrication has led to monotony and a revolt against the slick, angular art of "steel and glass boxes." Accent now is on "liveability," and the architects' search for better buildings is intense and pragmatic.

TRENDS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE MODERN ARCHITECTURE originated mainly in Central Europe-as a rebellion against overly ornate, dishonest nineteenth;century eclecticismAmerican concepts, building techniques and artistic, creative genius have from the very beginning participated in its . development and evolution. It was the little known American sculptor Horatio Greenough, who, in a series of essays published between 1843 and 1852, first¡ set forth the principal axioms of modern architecture. Greenough never practised architecture and his sculpture, some of which is found in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, seems mawkishly Victorian in its heroic realism. But he was a great thinker and philosopher on matters of art who intellectually rebelled at the artistic style of his time. It was he, to quote the architectural historian James Marston Fitch of Columbia University, "and not Louis Sullivan in the 1890's, who first formulated the notion that in architecture, as in nature, all form should derive from function. It was Greenough and not Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900's, who first raised the demand that architectural ornament and embellishment should be an organic part of the structure. It was Greenough who, eighty years before Le Cotbusier, pointed out that buildings should be regarded as machines, designed to produce comfort and convenience for their inhabitants. And it was he, and not the Walter Gropius of the pre-Hitler Bauhaus, who was first to declare that the men who built machines and ships were often closer to the essence of art than the professional artists themselves." There is not the slightest reason to suppose, of course, that any of these four great figures of modern architecture-Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, or Walter Gropius-ever heard of Greenough's work. But his essays, only recently rediscovered and republished, remind us that important ideas are never the exclusive property of one man or one nation, but well up simultaneously in many minds and many places. Like springs in the earth, they flow quietly underground. Then, suddenly, they burst forth to join into a mighty stream which may

A

LTHOUGH

change the course of history. Abstract concepts alone were not enough to overthrow the nineteenth-century notion that architectural design means fitting a modern purpose into some archaeological form copied from Egyptian tombs, Roman temples, Renaissance palaces, Gothic cathedrals or a combination of all of these. It was only when Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Eric Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier and others applied the new concepts to an emerging new technology, that the course of architectural history was decisively changed. These Europeans were largely jnspired by Frank Lloyd Wright who was hardly known in his own country at the time, but whose work was published in European periodicals. What impressed them in particular about Wright's architecture was the American's uncanny capacity to absorb technological advance and to convert it into new aesthetic discoveries. The Victorians would still go to great lengths to conceal such innovations as electric lighting, steam heat and steel frames. Wright used the electric lights not in fake chandeliers but for wholly new ways of dramatic lighting. He used central heating to break the confinement of box-like rooms and-installed at times in the floor-to create the free-flowing spaces of his open plan. He used modern plate glass not just for larger windows but for whole walls open to the garden, which created a wholly new indoor-outdoor relationship. He did not turn his steel columns into false Corinthian columns, but used them to create daring new forms, such as the hovering cantilevers of his Robie House. His means of turning modern technology into a new aesthetic became the essence of the new architecture. America's foremost contribution to that technology has been her perfection of metal frame construction to the point which made the skyscraper possible. Architecture in America has from its very beginning been conditioned by the fact that labour has always been scarce, and hence expensive, while materials-including Continued on next page


iron and steel-have always been plentiful and relatively cheap. The trend has thus been towards machine production. There is no masonry tradition in America, for instance, because brick and stone work requires too much expensive hand labour. And it was for this reason that Americans, very early in their history, cultivated skeleton construction, that is, the building of cage-like frames, first of wood and later of steel. The walls of these "cages" were merely skins-of shingle, clapboard or brick-which did not have to bear the load of successive storeys and the roof. After machinemade nails appeared in the 1830's, most American houses were built that way. Metal frames and pre-fabricated curtain walls of cast iron appeared in some parts of the United States as early as 1835. The world's first completely articulated, multi-storey steel skeleton, clothed in a non-structural skin, rose in Chicago in 1883-it was the Home Insurance Building designed by William Le Baron Jenny. Another technical development to have considerable influence on architecture was the invention of the elevator by the American Elisha G. Otis in 1852. At the turn of the century, Louis Sullivan and other architects of the Chicago School were designing curtain wall skyscrapers of powerful simplicity and distinction. Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier and the other avant-gardists used this construction method to develop the new architecture in which, as Louis .Sullivan put it in 1901, "form follows function." Modern architecture :was relatively late arriving on the American scene. Americans largely ignored their own prophets as they fanded pseudo-Classic architecture and often decorated even their skyscrapers with fake Greek columns or Gothic arches. The first public recognition of the European avant-garde came in 1932. That year, New York's Museum of Modern Art first exhibited the new architecture of France, Holland and Germany under the title "The International Style." A year later Hitler suppressed all but the most reactionary artistic creativity in Germany and Gropius, Mies, and many of their disciples left their native country to teach and practise their art in the United States. From this time on the "International Style" swept the United States. Many leading American architects studied with Gropius at Harvard or Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. And Frank Lloyd Wright at last also found honour in his own country. The style continues to flourish and develop. Mies van der Rohe, late in his seventies now, but forever puffing on his cigar, is as youthfully alert as any of his youngest students. He remains the foremost guardian of pristine, disciplined machine art functionalism. He is busier than ever in his life. And from the unassuming open loft of a .Chicago factory building that is his studio, emanate ever more and seemingly ever lighter glassy cubes and slabs articulated inside or out by steel frames of classical rhythm and proportion. Their simplicity is deceptive. For in their

meticulous details, from mullion to doorknob, in the use of highly finished and often precious materials, and not least in the ingenuity and efficiency of both the structure and the spaces it encloses, his buildings show a refinement of unquestionable beauty. One of Mies's most widely acclaimed masterpieces is the Seagram Building (see page 6), diagonally across from Lever House in New York (see page 2), which he designed with Philip Johnson. It was completed in 1958. The classicism of this skyscraper is most evident in the carefully studied ratio of three to five bays which dictates the basic unit of structure and design. The bronze facing of the building consists of mullions and spandrel sections, which clearly state the structure and provide a rhythmic, yet subtle vertical accent. In all its austerity the building conveys a luxurious elegance which never fails to impre~s, no matter how often one has viewed it. Not only tall office towers, like the Seagram Building, but also apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, residences and other building types continue to be designed in the Miesean manner, though few of them come even close to achieving the master's perfect harmony of design. Among the few buildings which do is the Chase Manhattan Bank in the downtown Wall Street section of New York, by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Stark in its simplicity, this sixty-storey glass tower, well articulated by strong exterior, aluminium-covered columns, makes a calm statement of solidity and strength. Its meticulous and luxurious finish inside and¡ out brings to mind Mies's famous dictum that God is in the details. . Mies's tremendous and continuing influence on American architecture has logical reasons. His architectural style-wherein the structural frame, whether outside the skin, flush with it, or on the inside, 'determines the design-is easy and seductively simple to devise. Component structural parts can be, and are pre-fabricated in mass production. This is particularly true of the curtain wall panels, used to enclose the frames, which are factorymade of glass, aluminium, stainless steel, enamelled steel and plastic in a variety of colours and textures, often with built-in insulation properties. But the seductive simplicity of this style also has its dangers. Foremost among them is monotony-the fact that we find the same glass boxes all over the country, from Boston to Los Angeles and from Richmond to Seattle or, for that matter, almost anywhere in the world. And on closer examination these machine-age products are often¡ not as technically efficient as they seem. The impact of heat, sun glare and cold-and in many parts of the United States the climatic differences are extremeseverely taxes the ingenuity of the engineers who, with elaborate equipment, must make such buildings comfortable inside. Le Corbusier's soleil-brise (sun-break or shield) and Edward D. Stone's decorative grilles answer Continued on page 20


Two colossI of modern architecture A controversial figure throughout most of his long career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) believed in freedom above all else, and the application of this belief is reflected in his monumental work. Graduating from the University of Wisconsin, he had his early practical training with Louis SuJHvan who taught him the basic principles of his craft. His main interest as an architect centred around the house as a place to live in. He experimented with all forms of structures ranging from his first "prairie houses" in America, with broad, horizontal lines and slablike walls that "hugged the earth in a marriage with the ground," to the earthquake proof Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where he used the cantilever principle to give the desired flexibility. He designed the famous Guggenheim Museum in New York City as "a curving wave¡that never breaks." In the words of another architect, "life, movement, variety and harmony with nature," distinguish the 700 or more buildings which testify to Wright's genius. The first architect to put into practice the idea "Form follows function," Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) was also the first to see and explore the possibilities of the tall building, and gave direction to the skyscraper of the future. Using masonry like a shell casing over a steel skeleton and fashioning a delicate tracery of ornament over it, he made the tall office building "every inch a proud and soaring thing." Born in Boston, he was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, but he was adding to his knowledge of architecture throughout his career. Between1880 and 1895 Sullivan designed more than a Mndred buildings-houses, skyscrapers, banks, shops, churches, hotels, theatres and clubs. Most of his active years were spent in Chicago and the midwest area of the u.s. The Auditorium Building in Chicago, which he designed in collaboration with Dankmar Adler, is perhaps the best known example of his work.


Emphasis in current architectural designs is on variety and a warm and human atmosphere. the problem only in part. Architects have further discovered that this style often tends not to follow function but a preconceived structural form into which function was, willy-nilly, fitted. There were second thoughts, too, whether slick, polished, precise and angular machine art is really satisfying to people. Or whether, on the contrary, people in our technological age do -not find greater emotional and aesthetic satisfaction in nature's organic, curvilinear forms, in rough textures, the play of light and shadow and unfinished natural materials. These second thoughts of the 1950's (or were they already a new rebellion against the victorious architectural revolution of the 1920's and 1930's?) also affect the plan, not just the elevation of buildings. In the interior, too, the emphasis is on variety and interest, on a warm and human atmosphere. "Liveability" has become the key word. And the new concern for interior function and convenience - the specially designed rooms and arrangements-are bursting the formal shells and exert their influence on the exterior form as well. School buildings, for instance, are no longer simple, square boxes. Their outer form generally denotes the careful effort inside to keep young children from bumping into the older ones, and to give each scholastic pursuit its own appropriate setting. Suburban schools are likely to be clusters of individual pavilions carefully arranged in their most efficient relation to each other and to the playgrounds, and placed jn a carefully landscaped environment (see story "Schools of Today and Tomorrow" on page 21). Homes, too, at least those which are thoughtfully designed, now give greater emphasis to privacy and the , different interests of each member of the family. They often feature a new indoor-outdoor relationship with actual and visual openings into gardens, patios and sheltered terraces. Even where actual space is limited, built-in furnishings, glass walls, and a flowing openness towards the inner court or sheltered patio combine to give the house a feeling of spaciousness. Individually designed houses are usually too expensive for the average-income, family. But new architectural innovations and ideas are quickly adapted to medium and low-cost houses, erected by builder-entrepreneurs as entire communities with hundreds of houses. They are planned by architects on the basis of a growing awareness of how people like to live, how they use buildings and how they feel about their environment. \ Along with this renewed emphasis on "liveability," came a reassertion of architectural tradition. Architects suddenly permitted themselves to re-discover history. In their struggle against nineteenth-century eclecticism they had sought the new and banished the past from their minds-and from their schools of architecture. Now that their battle was won, they could again afford to look back upon the glories of the Parthenon, the Hagia Sophia or

the Gothic cathedrals. These had never ceased to inspire ordinary people. This acknowledgement of past achievement-and the echoes of classic colonnades, Byzantine tracery or Gothic arches in the new architecture of the 1950's and 1960's-is thus also a concession to "liveability." It is part ofarchitecture's concern for people and what pleases them. Philip Johnson of the glass house was among the first to state: "I believe we should stand on the shoulders of the last generation and push ahead. .. I think there are values in history that Modem has thumbed its nose at and that Modem has lost ... we cannot afford not to know history." His architecture has since blossomed forth into charmingly baroque forms of which his lyrical "Roofless Church" at New Harmony, Indiana, is only one outstanding example. Again, neo-baroque, neo-expressionism, the new exuberance-whatever one may call the diverse new directions architecture is taking-probably received their primary impulse from abroad. It is hard to tell. Ideas, particularly in art, usually spring up simultaneously in many minds and places. And whatever the source, changes in architectural style and technique are- always more quickly adapted and more widely felt in America than elsewhere in the world. There is little inherently native tradition to resist change. And the search for better housing and building is therefore all the more intense and entirely pragmatic. An important impulse seems to have come from that versatile Picasso of architecture, Le Corbusier. It was largely his small but sensational, chapel of Ronchamp, built 1950 to 1955, in the Vosges Mountains of France, which turned architecture from geometric functionalism to sculptural emotionalism. It can be argued, on the other hand, that at the time the Ronchamp chapel was first shown and discussed in the architectural magazines, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York (see page 4), equally curvilinear, equally plastic and equally a radical departure from what had become conventional modem architecture, was already on the drawing boards. In spirit and design it much resembled some of Wright's earlier work, particularly the Morris Shop in San Francisco of 1948 whose main feature is also a spiralling ramp. In Brazil, in 1943, Oscar Niemeyer had already built his Church of St. Francis at Pampulha, whose rhythmically flowing parabolic vaults form both the roof and side walls. It, too, was undoubtedly a forerunner of the new trend now coming into its own. And so were the architectural visions the German-born architect Eric Mendelsohn sketched as early as 1917 in the trenches of World War 1. Mendelsohn's architectural fantasies could not be engineered at the time, even if popular taste had accepted them. But they proved prophetic and amazingly resemble the very newest sculptural structures. - W.V. E.


A great challenge for the modern architect, school architecture has to be functional as well as resthetic. It must keep pace with vast, rapid changes in teaching techniques.

SCHOOLS

Design of San Francisco school, background, takes advantage of hilly terrain

OF TODAY AND TOMORROW more challenging or exacting demands on architectural ingenuity than those made by the special needs of modem schools. In the United States the majority of elementary and secondary schools, with a total enrolment of about forty million pupils, are supported by public funds. Economyconscious school boards call for building designs which combine maximum functional value and utilization of available space with flexibility and a minimum of outlay. To meet these requirements without sacrifice of aesthetic considerations is the architect's dilemma. But the challenge is being successfully met and a number of recently constructed school buildings are remarkable for the bold and effective innovations which American architects have introduced in designing these structures. A prime need, of course, is that of space for the expanding, multifarious activities of the modem school. Many U.S. school systems now provide facilities for education ranging from the kindergarten to the junior college stage and including such teaching and recreational aids as television in the class-room, laboratories, auditoriums, carpentry shops, playgrounds, gymnasiums, even swimming pools. And since the public pays for these schools and their upkeep, it expects that besides normal use by the pupils, some of these facilities, such as the school hall and the swimming pool, should be available for the use of the whole community during holidays or after-school hours. To avoid wasteful use of expensive space, auditoriums are now being designed for multiple purposes so that when Continued on next page HERE ARE FEW

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In sunny, warm Louisiana, raised structure of Phillis Wheatley School, above, provides shaded area for recreational activities. In landscape composition for high school campus in Massachusetts, architect created textured design to add variety and contrast, below.


In modern designs of schools, the two key words are flexibility and adjustment of space.

A pleasant, convenient atmosphere for reading and study was created in this library room, above, for students of elementary classes. To create storage space for student art room of a New York school the architect planned cupboards under work surfaces, below.

the halls are not required for large meetings or for use as theatres or playrooms, they can be easily divided into a number of rooms for teaching work or other school activity. This is accomplished by drawing partitions across the auditorium, which are an integral part of the design and can be easily fixed or inobtrusively removed when not required. Applying the same principle, in some schools classrooms are quickly converted to lunchrooms during the lunch hour, or they can be expanded for parties and meetings by opening doors to adjacent rooms. Teaching techniques in the United States, as elsewhere, are being constantly reviewed and revised, and building designs must also take into account these changing techniques and the need for flexibility and adjustment of space. For instance, current opinion favours groups of 100 or 150 students for much of the general teaching routine against the traditional class of thirty students. On the other hand, smaller groups of five to fifteen are favoured for informal discussions and exchange of ideas, and there is also preference for individual work or study places where each student can keep his books and other requisites and enjoy some degree of privacy. These conflicting needs are being met by new and ingenious methods of adjusting space to different requirements. For large groups a "U"-shaped arrangement is sometimes adopted, with demonstration tables, screens, boards and other equipment at the open end of the "U" and tiers of seats and counter-tops for students on the sides. Individual work areas are provided by panel divisions and a suitable arrangement of desks. Specific spaces are set apart for motion-picture projectors,


Large circular wash basins in Connecticut school reduce plumbing costs, save space.

teaching machines and the other electronic aids which are becoming an increasing part of present-day teaching equipment. Adequate lighting, air ventilation, acoustics and safeguards against adverse weather have, of course, to be considered in any architectural design. Glass walls make for improved lighting and help to bring sunshine into the rooms. In some buildings, windows are replaced by prismatic glass blocks in the ceiling. To break the glare of direct sunlight, baffles and louvres are incorporated in some designs. Outer sliding panel walls enable the classroom to be moved outdoors in fair weather without effort. Where necessary, corridors are designed to shield the building from winds and fog. Many schools have covered play areas where students may have their games even during rainy or inclement weather. The general layout of the school campus is as important as that of the classrooms. Topography and any unusual geographical features of the site are carefully studied by the architect with the dual object of making the best possible use of the space and halmonizing the design of the building with its natural settings. A hilly terrain naturally lends itself to a different pattern of construction from a site in the plains, and the shape or dimensions of the site also influence the design. A school in a hill district in California has an enclosed walk leading over a ravine from one classroom to another. For a high school in Los Angeles, the architect chose a "wagon wheel" pattern which provides for an inner court and parking space for students' cars, surrounded on all sides by buildings, the entire campus Continued on next page

New schools have windows in the ceiling, left, which keep corridors lighted and airy. Glass walls, right, create feeling of unity with outdoors and help bring light in rooms.


The general layout of school campus is of the same importance as that of classroom. taking on the appearance of a huge wheel. These are some of the shapes of the American schools of today. What about the school of tomorrow, the institution which will cater for the community's educational needs some thirty-five years from now at the beginning of the twentyfirst century? A preview of such an institution may be had by visitors to the Hall of Education at the World's Fair in New York. They can see there the architect's concept of a compact school planned to accommodate 60,000 persons and serving the varied educational needs of a population of 250,000. A conspicuous feature of the complex structure is three huge towers up to 500 feet in height and inter-connected by walkways at different levels. Each tower will house facilities for a specialized learning area: Human Resources, Science and Cultural Media. The buildings at the base will be used for theatricals, lectures and other cultural and social activities. The School of Tomorrow will be a "veritable electronics wonderland, served by computers, television, individual learning centres and many other miracles of technology." A revolutionary piece of equipment which its students might expect to use is termed the "studysphere." This is an opaque globe, six feet in diameter, which the student would use for individual, undisturbed study, himself controlling its temperature. The "studysphere" will be equipped to receive radio and visual signals from all over the world including those bounced off the moon, and will be fitted with television and film screens, tape-recording facilities, an instant printing device, a light-sensitive writing desk and other study aids. This may sound like a fantasy but it is the kind of fantasy which is likely to be translated into reality before long. And school architecture must keep pace with these fantastic changes in teaching techniques which technology is helping to bring about so rapidly. •

Many of the new school buildings in the United States are now designed in a carefully landscaped environment, taking full advantage of exterior surroundings for a variety of activities including class meetings, recreation, lunch and recess periods.


The new novelists have turned their gaze inward and produced a literature of the Self charged with the hopes, "aspirations, fears and incongruities of the naked human soul."

AMERICA'S POSTWAR FICTION

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BY IHAB HASSAN

Professor of English, Wesleyan University TIS IRONIC that literature, which has always enhanced man's capacity for life, should be defined historically by periods of world havoc. Such, however, appears to be the case. The extraordinary modem movement that began after the First World War has run itself out. A new literature has come into being since the Second World War. Its makers constitute a younger generation attuned to the spiritual needs of a changed and still changing society. Unlike technology, however, literature knows no discontinuity and no obsolescence. It is important, therefore, to view the achievement of the new writers against the looming achievement of their predecessors. Critics of the new literature often point out that no writers of stature, comparable to novelist William Faulkner, poet T. S. Eliot, or playwright Eugene O'Neill, have emerged on the postwar scene. This is only superficially true; for time is a lens that makes the past loom large. If there are still no giants in recent American fiction, there are probably more novelists of the first rank now than a generation ago. Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, James Purdy, William Styron, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O'Connor, among the new writers, are very likely to make a permanent place for themselves in literary history. There is also more diversity in social, religious, and geographic backgrounds among novelists of today, a diversity which only partially reflects the variety of America itself. What the new writers probably lack, however, is the urge to experiment radically with the forms of fiction. These experiments were performed earlier in the century by such modern mastersEuropean and American-as Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. The task of recent novelists has been to assimilate these experiments or to adapt them to their own uses. In the twenties, the experiments in fiction seemed striking because they heralded an open break with the solid tradition of the nineteenth century; the First World War had induced an unparalleled feeling of disillusionment with the rational and optimistic outlook of that century. But the writers of the fifties were more un-illusioned than disillusioned; they never knew the stable world in which their predecessors had lived in their youth. They began, as it were, with a sense of disorder which the Second World War only served to confirm. The form of the contemporary American novel is therefore a form of irony and ambiguity, of deflected motives and secret intentions. It is a form that accepts truthfully the shattering

I

complexity of modern reality, its loose ends, broken links, surprises and reversals. It very often departs from realistic modes, making use of fable and whimsy, dream and symbol, to convey the elusive quality of experience. For the contemporary novelist understands that form is not a dogma, crude and prescriptive, but a revelation. If at times the distinctions between comedy and tragedy, heroism and rascality, sickness and health, are not always clear in current fiction, this is because revelations are not always simple. Therein lies the vital difference between art and propaganda. In one important respect the new writers have been more extreme than the preceding generation in their probing of the Self. In the works of such earlier novelists as Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Lewis, Steinbeck, and Faulkner, to mention only a few, the tension between Self and Society was still maintained; the search for self-knowledge was often conjoined with a desire for social justice. Nowadays, most writers tend to feel that the vast complexities of public life repel individual effort; they are fearful that human identity may be lost in the impersonal machinery of mass society or the superstate. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have chosen to turn their gaze inward, to focus on the private and concrete elements of experience, and to search for a personal idea of love or liberty which accords to man his dignity as a free moral being. The literature they have produced is a literature of the Self, charged with the aspirations and fears and incongruities of the naked soul. The literature of the Self should not be viewed as a withdrawal from reality. It is merely a reaction to it, intended to grasp it in communicable forms. For the character of reality in the postwar world seemed to many novelists, like the character of the war itself, outrageous and intractable. Its facts were often more stunning than its fictions. The experience of the war presented in such powerful novels as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962) laid a basis for contemporary experience. It featured disruptive chaos and equally disruptive organization, efficient yet senseless violence, the bureaucratization of man himself. This experience was carried over into civilian life despite the unprecedented leisure and affluence of American society, persisting there as a substratum of anguish. On the surface, American culture may often seem dominated by conformity or compromise; graceful suburbs and houses with Continued on next page


picture windows to which harried junior executives retire for cocktails and a cookout on a green lawn before settling for the evening in front of a large TV screen. A popular attempt to depict this world was made in Sloan Wilson's novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and some sociological examinations of it were also made in William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and A.C. Spectorsky's The Exurbanites (1955). But the most serious and influential work on the subject remains sociologist David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), in which the trend from the "inner-directed" to the "other-directed" personality, from the self-driven individual to the group-oriented man, was analysed in considerable detail Yet even so acute a sociologist as Riesman could underestimate the latent energy of dissent and diversity in American society. The surface cliches of conformity are denied by deeper motives in the culture. These are the compelling motives that define themselves, in current fiction, in opposition to the images presented on billboards or television commercials. In the underside of culture, the old American search for identity persists. Reflected in the mirror of fiction, this quest takes a dual form: it appears as a search for love and as a search for freedom. The two quests start from different points; yet they often meet in the figure of the rebel-victim, the typical hero of current fiction who carries affirmation and denial to their limit, seeking always, as heroes must do, to transform defeat into victory. It is crucial that we understand this hero with a troubled mien, for he stands very nearly at the moral centre of current fiction. In many respects, he does not appear heroic in the least. He tends to suffer more than to act. He is presented often as a child, a grotesque, a clown, a cripple, a scapegoat, or a rogue. Almost always, he is presented as an outsider: an adolescent never confirmed in his initiation to adult life, or an adult alienated from his society. He seems the anti-hero. But being at once a rebel and a victim, he serves to reconcile the extreme responses to current reality, the extremes of affirmation and denial, the eternal Yes and everlasting No. He is, in a sense, the novelist's answer to the supreme challenge of the modem world: that man must either conform or abolish himself. The true function of the new hero (or anti-hero) is to create those authentic and personal values which an age of over-organization has failed to provide. This is why there is something almost religious in the redemptive passion of this hero. Who knows but that the new power of contemporary literature, when that power finally becomes clear, shall prove to be essentially religious in its quality, a power born under the shadow of nihilism, yet dedicated to a way of life that transcends the facts of existence? It is of great interest to view some types of the new hero in fiction. Rebellion and victimization, crime and saintliness, define the poles of his experience, the outer limits of his character. Between these poles, the faces of the hero shade and blend into one another. Let us begin at one pole. Rebellion, frenzied self-affirmation, even crime are part of his lot, as the characters in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) testify. Footloose drifters in search of kicks and revelation, they scourge the country from coast to coast in

stolen cars. The hero of Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead, offers an even better example. Sergeant Croft is icy-eyed and iron-willed, a crack soldier but a murderer too. Croft is all power and blind instinctual energy. He is possessed by a demon which drives him to assault, quite recklessly, a mountain on an island in the South Pacific, assault it with the same kind of fury that Captain Ahab unleashed against the great white whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, published nearly a hundred years earlier. Croft fails. Still, the mountain represents to him everything that man must conquer; it is freedom, power, knowledge, evil, and eternal life. Croft, who hates everything that is not part of himself, pits himself madly against the Absolute. At the other pole, it is saintliness, victimization, even outright defeat, that are part of the hero's lot. The emotionally paralysed hero, waiting to be accepted into the army, of Saul Bellow's Dangling Man (1944), the helpless soldiers in James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), the lost souls in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951), or Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1957), come to mind. For an example of pure immolation, the figure of Singer, the deaf-mute who stands at the dead centre of Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (l940),serves well. Singer is the town legend and its dumb confessor. He takes upon himself the evil and sorrows of others, playing the role of an unwilling Christ for men he is finally powerless to redeem. Above all, Singer is a lover-he alone has the capacity for mute and boundless love. His suicide reveals the limits of his love as of his holiness; for by taking his life he produces a debacle in the life of others. In a sense, then, both Croft and Singer-they are true opposites-fail. Yet their failure clarifies the moral predicament of those who surround them. It is a defeat that turns into a victory for truth. When we move away from these two polar positions of the hero, these boundaries of experience where violence reigns, we find in the middle ground some other types of heroes. The face of one of them is bitter-sweet. It is both nostalgic and quixotic, sad and humorous, sentimental and ironic. It is perhaps the face of J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, the schoolboy hero of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), his red hunting cap askew on his head, looking for obscenities scrawled on walls in order to erase them so that the world may become a little cleaner. Or it is perhaps the face of Holly Golightly, the heroine of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), pinched and defiant, caring for her stray cat in the wilderness of New York. Or again the face of Malcolm, in James Purdy's Malcolm (1959), innocent and orphaned, waiting eternally for a Father who never appears. These latter-day picaresques, these kindly and whimsical children of old Don Quixote, are often adolescents. In the great tradition of Mark Twain's Huck Finn, they expose the corruption and mendacity and cruelty of the world. And in the tradition of Huck Finn, too, these contemporary adolescents end by making their escape from society. Holden ends in a sanatorium; Holly escapes to Africa; and Malcolm is literally consumed by love. Even with the middle-of-the-road hero, truth is incompatible with the modem experience, and vision is a


private grace. This fact is not restricted to adolescents whom we may be inclined to dismiss as immature. The conflict between private and social vision applies to the adult picaresque hero: the protagonist of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953), adept at manoeuvres and evasions, an explorer of the near-at-hand in search of adventure and love; or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), the Negro who ends his bruising career, after many rejections and objections on the open streets, in a coal cellar lit by a multitude of electric bulbs. Whether he keeps .moving on the road of life, like Bellow's hero, or hides in a hole underground, like Ellison's, the hero finds no way of making his life viable in the world of diapers, bank accounts, newspaper headlines, or mothers-in-law. The new picaresque seems to be here to remind us that the antic figures of the age are also mournful, and that even comedy can have a bitter edge. But there is another hero who occupies the middle ground. He is the grotesque who exemplifies pathos rather than violent tragedy, just as the picaresque seemed to exemplify whimsical irony rather than happy comedy. Contemporary fiction is full of grotesque, maimed, or malformed creatures, in whom physical distortion corresponds to spiritual loneliness, to the deflection of love or of guilt. This is the case in Flannery O'Connor's impressive novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear /1 Away (1960), in which religious passion in the South runs wild and assumes outlandish forms; or Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), in which a boy's quest for identity is perverted by his uncle amid the most sinister decor; or Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Cajii (1951), in which a tough, solitary woman lavishes her pure love in vain on an evil hunchback. Far from being the morbid or simply monstrous figures that insensitive journalists make them out to be, the grotesque figures created by contemporary novelists are powerful attempts to express spirit. They deny materialism and reject both power and practicality. They are all children of love. Their predicament is that in their acute isolation they have allowed a single dream or fear to twist their lives out of shape. Their abnormality, therefore, is the price men pay when they close themselves are barred externally from-rich human internally C to-or intercourse. In short, they are presented as exemplary victims of a break-down of communication. The contemporary American scene is almost too rich with talent. New writers emerge every day, clamouring for attention; a few fade away after some dazzling early success. Publicity bombards the public, and readers cannot always discriminate with confidence between good "popular" novels such as Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951) and a good "serious" novel such as Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959). It is still possible, however, to discern certain trends in current literature, and also to focus on certain novelists whose impact is already visible. Some of these novelists we have encountered earlier; others need to be mentioned. The American South has nurtured some of the finest novelists alive. Its ceremonious and, since the Civil War, tragic awareness, its deep sense of family and place. give its literature a unique feeling both of piety and terror. Carson McCullers

(b. 1917) may be the oldest of the postwar writers in this group. Her conception of grotesques seeking to transcend their spiritual isolation, as in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, is one of the striking concepts of our time. In The Member of the Wedding (1946), she unfolds with great poignancy the hopes of an adolescent girl, her desire to belong to the adult world. With Mrs. McCullers, the Southern tradition of the novel, shaped by Faulkner, takes a sensitive, even a feminine, turn; it is refined into a style that has not escaped imitation or misuse. Truman Capote (b. 1924), who does not like to be labelled a Southerner, moved from the haunted nightmare of Other Voices, Other Rooms, which he wrote at the age of twenty-three, to the daylight romance of The Grass Harp (1951), which treats a group of eccentrics, including a boy, his elderly aunt and a Negro servant, who take refuge from the world up in a tree. Most recently, Capote has moved again, to the zany Breakfast at Tiffany's. Capote is an artist precise in his idiom to the point of finickiness, and luxurious in his imagination. His devotion to words permits him to roam the fabulous and mysterious realms of human consciousness without losing himself entirely in their darkness. Equally precise in her idiom, but even more terrifying and original in her vision, Flannery O'Connor (b. 1925) depicts the violence of man's spirit in its quest for salvation. In Wise Blood, for instance, she portrays a fanatic Southern preacher whose search for grace is as genuine as it is murderous. Her collection' of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), focuses on the same broad theme with a steady eye and unwavering pity. Nothing in these tense narratives about good and evil is ever superfluous. Another Southerner who does not like to limit himself entirely to the attitudes of Southern fiction, William Styron (b. 1925) wrote a brilliant and tragic first novel in Lie Down in Darkness (1951). The book unravels the Freudian intricacies of family life, following in particular the compulsive relation of a young girl to her father. Styron's novelette about the Marine Corps, The Long March (1952), is a terse study of rebellion and conformity, and of the meaning of individual dignity. His most recent work, Set This House on Fire (1960), is set chiefly in Italy. It portrays the struggle of an artist to rid himself of the evil influence of a friend, and thereby achieve a measure of selfrespect as a free man. It was widely acclaimed in Europe as an existential novel of the first order; but its theme is an old American theme: the definition of freedom and responsibility through courage. Wherever he is born, South or West, the Negro novelist has tended to move North where the publishing centres of the nation can be found. But the movement is also a spiritual journey, a quest for identity, an attempt to come to terms with his heritage and to define his anomalous position as a free descendant of slaves. No one has rendered this journey in fiction better than Ralph Ellison (b. 1914). His single novel to date-another big novel is on the way-is Invisible Man, a rich, passionate, and Continued on next page


The new frontier of American fiction lies in the secret chambers of the imagination. overpowering work, crowded with incidents, and alive with the rhythms both of literary speech and dialect. The novel, above all, shows extraordinary energy of mind, a capacity for understanding the predicament of men, white or black, tempered by anger and compassion, never by bitterness. The adventures of its hero, a Negro boy who is "invisible" to everyone because he is black, carry us into a seething New York where realism seems indistinguishable from surrealism. Even more intense and high-keyed, James Baldwin (b. 1924) has been at his best in two works of non-fiction, Notes of a Native Son (1951) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), collections of scathing political and literary essays. In his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin captures the strains and marvels of his Harlem childhood with Biblical poetry. But in Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), both dealing with desperately complex adult lives, the author's control of his material, and therefore of his style, is less sure. In such vast cities as Chicago or New York, the novelist has found abundant matter for fiction. J. D. Salinger (b. 1919) is perhaps the most widely read author of the postwar era, and certainly the most influential among American youth. His Catcher in the Rye remains the testament of a whole generation in search of new values; its adolescent hero embodies all the revulsions against sham and corruption that the world inherited. Its language, piquant and funny and unique, has been imitated in books and on the streets. A master of the short story too, as his Nine Stories (1953) testifies, Salinger likes to confront love with squalor in everyday life. His latest series of novelettes, Franny and Zooey (1961) and Seymour (1963) spin out, in mordant and hilarious fashion, the myth of the gifted Glass family, a cunning mirror of the manner and motives of middle class society. The essential quality of these novelettes is sentiment compounded with irony, a sort of whimsy which reaches out to mystical love but falls back again to redeem the vulgarity of the world below. Their interest in Oriental religions spurred an interest in Zen among adolescents. The most impressive novelist since the war, however, may be Saul Bellow (b. 1915). Bellow, who is also more prolific than most authors of his generation, writes in the great, intelligent tradition of the novel; in his work, realism is constantly modified by the full powers of the imagination. His central concerns are freedom and love. Yet his versatility is evident in the differences between such earlier realistic novels as Dangling Man and The Victim (1947) and the torrential later narratives-The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King-which affirm the openness, the very hope, of life. The latter novel, comic as it is profoundly touching, describes an extraordinary personal quest, in the heartlands of Africa, for salvation through service to others. His finest work, however, may well be the novelette-, Seize the Day (1956), which penetrates to the heart of American society in depicting the reconciliation of its hero, who has been a business failure, to the fact of death. If Bellow is the most impressive novelist in the traditional manner, Norman Mailer (b. 1923) may be the most ambitious, and rebellious talent of his generation. The raw force of his

novel, The Naked and the Dead, attends all his turbulent career. In his two subsequent works, Barbary Shore (1951), a political novel, and The Deer Park (1955), about Hollywood stars and their hangers-on, Mailer is not entirely in control. Yet one senses a new emergent vision, an existential feeling of terror that transcends political or social realities. The vision is confirmed in Advertisements for Myself (1959), which includes a searing essay, "The White Negro," that has become the manifesto of hipsters and rebels. Mailer's uncanny knowledge of the demonic element in man enables him to judge his society not merely from the outside, as a dissenter, but also from the inside, as a seer. He is thus able to relate orgy or crime in the life of his characters ¡to the insanity of the world at large. In "The White Negro" he writes: "If our collective condition is to live with the instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State ... or with a slow death by conformity ... why then the only lifegiving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger ... to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the selL" This statement by Mailer may not possess the dignity of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech which avers "that man will not merely endure: he will prevail." But it has the eloquence and the danger of the times, and it is not less affirmative. It shows how much literature acknowledges the perils to man, and how far it has moved towards redressing the balance of his anonymity. Has it already moved too far? Future generations will tell. We can only be sure that even now the American novel is full of laughter in the dark. A new comic spirit pervades it. "That's the animal ridens in me," concludes Bellow's Augie March, "the laughing creature, forever rising up." Living with death, as Mailer claims, the novel' has also summoned all the powers of its exuberance. It celebrates the continuities of existence. John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), about an eccentric New England family, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), a hilarious narrative of some oddballs in a bombing squadron seeking human autonomy despite the exigencies of war, burst upon us with their uncontrollable glee. Like Augie March, they persuade us to refuse a disappointed life. Beyond rage, beyond anguish, the voice of American fiction rises gaily, transfiguring all its dread. No final judgment on current fiction in America can yet be made. The contemporary novel is like a dream that we may wake one day to find ourselves living. But in dreams, as the old poet said, begin responsibilities. We shall do well, therefore, to heed the warning of fiction and to embrace its joys. We shall do well to gaze wonderingly at the images it has given us of ourselves. There lies the new frontier: in the secret chambers of the imagination, opening marvellously on the future. The new hero in American fiction may seem to us at the moment somewhat troubled and extreme, a figure of transitional hopes. But he may yet prove the herald of a saner era, and a harbinger of the estate to which man will be restored in his full humanity. This is the dream that American literature dreamed even before Columbus found America. That is to say, this is the universal dream of men. •


THE HERITAGE OF LINCOLN

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to carefor him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow,¡ and his orphan-to do all which mqy achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. -Abraham Lincoln HESE WORDS OF WISDOM and Gompassion were spoken a hundred years ago as Lincoln began his second term of office, in the closing days of America's Civil War. Five weeks later the war virtually ended with the surrender of the Southern commander, Robert E. Lee. Days afterwards, on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was dead of an assassin's bullet. With him died all chance of realizing his great vision of a just and merciful peace, for in the victorious North the voices of those who sought vengeance were many and loud. Lincoln, and only he, who in four terrible years of Civil War had demonstrated infinite skill in leadership, determination of purpose, and greatness of heart, and whose sweeping re-election armed him with a mandate of the people, could have marked the postwar years with th~ forgiveness

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mr. Viorst, author of Liberalism in American Politics, and Hostile Allies: Roosevelt and De Gaulle, is a frequent contributor of articles of political analysis to magazines. A graduate of Rutgers University (1951), he holds advanced degrees from Columbia and Harvard Universities, and was a Fulbright Scholar.

and brotherhood he described in his Second Inaugural Address. . Yet despite the bitterness and frustrations of the Reconstruction Era, Lincoln's dreams and hopes did not die with him. He left with his country not merely a memory to venerate, not merely a spirit to emulate but a vision of the future, a sense of national purpose. Lincoln restored a riven and faltering people to their ideals and persuaded that people to cherish them. Abraham Lincoln, a poor Southerner by birth who lived as a boy in a log cabin in Illinois, grew to maturity convinced that human slavery was immoral. In 1855, he wrote bitterly to a friend: "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' " His capacity for compassion may be summed up in his sentence, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." But like many men of high ideals in the mid-nineteenth century, Lincoln understood that slavery could not be abolished without tearing Continued on next page


asunder the American nation. Under the Constitution, the institution of slavery enjoyed certain guarantees, the South's conditions in 1787 for joining the new United States. Southerners were determined to maint~in and, whenever possible, to extend slavery. Lincoln, as a consequence, faced a dilemma. If the price of preserving the Union was the extension of slavery, he would not pay it, If the price of emancipation was destruction of the Union, he would not pay that, either. Lincoln joined the party whIch sought to find the formula to combine union and morality, without really believing such a formula existed. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," he explained. " ... It will become all one thing. or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." .Lincoln thus announced his policy of opposing slavery by arresting its growth, hoping thereby to make it wither and die. Lincoln was chosen by the Republican Party to run for President in 1860 because he deeply opposed slavery but was known to be judicious and calm. His candidacy was not meant as a challenge to the South. But in the slave States extremism was running high and any candidate who was not pro-slavery was regarded as anti-South. The majority of the North ele.cted Lincoln in repudiation of Southern extremism. The slave States of the South, interpreting it as an act of hostility, one after another seceded from the Union. Provincial and unsophisticated, ill-fitting clothes drapin~ his gangling frame, the homely Lincoln who arrived in Washington from Illinois in 1861, hardly seemed the man to rescue a divided land. Not only had the South left the Union but the North was torn between those who favoured enforcing an "immediate end to slavery and those who would give in on the slavery issue to repair the breach in the Union. A few slave States resisted the temptation to secede and their loyalty to the Union, Lincoln realized, must not be alienated. More than one ambitious Washington politician, feeling himself

more suited for the demands of the time, aspired to become the power behind the White House throne. Lincoln, with candour and deliberateness, firmly asserted the authority of the Presidency. He would not be provocative to the South but he would not surrender Federal sovereignty. In his First Inaugural Address, he made his intentions clear to the secessionists: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so .... (But) I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States .... The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasionno use of force against or among the people anyw here. " When the Confederate Army, in midApril, 1861, fired on the Federal bastion of Fort Sumter in the harbour at Charleston, South Carolina, the period of cold confrontation was over. The war was on. As hostilities opened, the war had only one issue: Union versus Secession. The North argued that no State could withdraw from the United States; the South .argued that, being sovereign, any State could at any time declare its independence. In a narrow sense, the issue was constitutional and might have been settled in a court. But the ConstItution contained no clear answer. And at stake was far more than a legal question that a court cO.ulddecide. Lincoln saw the war as the test of the. ability of¡ free government to survive. He recognized an obligation to proponents of freedom everywhere. The American people, he said, "must demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion-that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. " But the South, too, insisted that its cause was freedom. Denying that slavery was wrong,

I


new thrust and new direction. The enactments of Congress, as decisively as the Union battalions, sent the old South into retreat. At first the Union battalions, however brave, were uniformly unsuccessful against the brilliantly led Confederates. Lincoln's most immediate problem was his army, for the North had been poorly prepared for fighting and lacked able generals. Incompetent military leadership let slip away countless opportunities for the clear-cut victory that would have spared the bitterness and bloodshed of protracted war. Until he appointed General Ulysses S. Grant to supreme command, near the end of 1863, Lincoln was himself chief strategist and planner for the ever-growing military machine of the Union. But more important, Lincoln had to grapple with the issue of slavery. As long as a negotiated peace to mend the Union seemed possible, Lincoln was reluctant to act against Southern slave-holding. As late as August 1862, he .Southerners saw no inconsistency in its perpetu- wrote: "My paramount object in this struggle ation within an otherwise free society. Ironi- is to save the Union, and is not either to save, cally, many lovers of freedom in Europe at or to destroy slavery." But, in reality, Lincoln first took the South's side, equating its aspira- had already made up his mind that the Civil tions with those of oppressed peoples throughout War must become a moral struggle. The pressure the continent who sought to throw off a foreign of the abolitionists in the North was growing. yoke. But it could hardly be forgotten that ~ritain and the rest of Europe wanted moral the South sought liberty only to perpetuate justification for backing the North'rather than slavery. The South's identification with the the South. Lincoln, to give the appearance of hopes of free men was only temporary. acting from strength and not desperation, Closely tied to the perpetuation of slavery decided to wait for a Union, victory. It came were the economic issues that underlay the war. at Antietam in Maryland in mid-September As long as the nation remained principally 1862. Immediately afterwards, Lincoln proagrarian, the'South, with its wealth of cotton claimed his intention to free the slaves in the and other staple agricultural products, could rebellious States. A few weeks later he.,said: retain its political power and defend its social "In giving Freedom to the slave, we assure organization. But the North was restless and Freedom to the free." On January 1, 1863, full of et).ergy,anxious to industrialize and to he issued his official Emancipation Proclamaburst its frontiers to the west. For years Southern tion. Though the- Proclamation was admittedly politicians had contained the North but seces- dictated partly by considerations of political exsion, paradoxicaUy,doomed the South's agrarian pediency~its meaning was not thereby weakened. domination. 'Unencumbered by Southern repre- The North,' henceforward, fought to banish sentation, Congress during the Ciyil War enacted the institution of human slavery from the soil into law a remarkable programme of legislation. of the United States. It provided for the construction of railroads Lincoln presented the most eloquent exfrom sea to sea, for the grant of free land to pression of his war aims in his dedication of the' any who would settle in the west, for the cemetery on the battlefield at Gettysburg, where establishment ,of universities in every State, in the summer of 1863 the Union won its most' for a favourable tariff to spur the growth of significant victory. In its few but mighty words, industry. The Civil War gave the United States Continued on IJext page "


the Gettysburg Address revealed a destiny to the Ameri~an people. Though they have never quite achieved the "new birth of freedom" for which Lincoln called, the American people have ~.accepted his ideal and at their finest have never ceased striving to attain it. "Four score and seven years ago," said Lincoln at Gettysburg, "our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived" in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. "But, in a larger sense,we cannot dedicatewe cannot consecrate-' we cannot hallowthis ground. The braye men, living and dead, who struggled here, hav~ consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remajning ¡before tis-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that ..cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Though the South's fate was sealed at the Battle of Gettysburg, Southern leaders hoped that, if the struggle were prolonged, the North would become so impatient or demoralized that it would consent to a negotiated peace, assuring the Confederacy's independence. With skill and valour, the Confederate Army fought on, knowing itcould not win. At times, Southern tenacity did undermine the determination of the people of the North but Lincoln never wavered. His example gave the Union strength to fight on. As the war drew to a close, Lincoln made

his plans for a peace that would re-establish the American nation in its integrity, wiping out its deep divisions, both geographic and human. He rejected all vengeance. What he sought was reconciliation, not only between North and South but also between white and Negro. He asked of Southerners that they renounce rebellion and return as loyal citizens of the United States. He appealed to the two races to "gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the neW." He looked forward to a programme of education for young Negroes, to prepare them for their new privileges and responsibilities. Lincoln's vision was of an American people reunited, giving birth to freedom anew, for one and all. Lincoln's dream was not to be realized. The clamour for revenge in the North was piercing. Unscrupulous politicians saw the South's degradation as a means of prolonging the Northern mqnopoly in Congress. Selfish financial interests opposed any reassertion of Southern economic power. These were men who cared little about the Negro. They would abandon him when he ceased to serve their purposes. They would not hesitate, in their own interests, to strike an alliance in the South with those forces who sought to reassert old claims over the Negro. It would have taken a strong hand to enforce a peace of reconciliation in an atmosphere of opportunism and hate. Perhaps Lincoln's would have been strong enough. But Lincoln's, wheri the time came, was missing and those of his successors to the Presidency were weak. A century has passed since the Civil War, and misunderstandings still exist between North and South. White and Negro still have not learned to live together in. perfect amity. Much of the hatred that spawned Civil War and was aggravated by it is still a burden to the nation. But the heritage of Lincoln remains strong throughout the land. Lincoln knew the difference between right and wrong and pointed out the path. The American people-sometimes haltingly, occasionally backward, ever too slowly, but relentlessly onward"""Thavetrodden that path. Its end remains distant but they have approached closer and closer to it. The heritage of Abraham Lincoln will always be a great beacon lighting the way. -


IN THE hospital someone's heart stops. Or he stops breathing. A nurse hurriedly puts in an alarm and a moment later the loudspeakers boom out: "Attention Please! Attention Please! Code 99!" This means that a man is dying. It tells doctors to come on the run. Nurses dash for a cart already loaded with equipment and in a matter of seconds, a new kind of medical team is at the patient's bedside-a team which may literally bring him back from the dead. St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, where these pictures were taken, pioneered the use of such teams eight years ago. Since then, they have saved the lives of fifty-two people, (including ten heart attack patients who had been clinically "dead.") Using new techniques of artificial respiration and circulation, the teams can revive heart victims, who might otherwise be lost, if they can get to them in the crucial first four minutes-before the patient's brain begins to die. It is only seconds since "Code 99" sounded. The emergency patient has had a severe heart attack and his heart has just stopped pumping. The first persons on the scene do the most urgent jobs: Continued on next page

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OMEWHERE


getting aIr lllto the patient's lungs and blood into his brain. The doctor blows air into lungs with plastic mouthpiece, then anaesthetist takes over with hand respirator. At the same time, another doctor vigorously massages patient's chest in an effort to force heart to pump blood to the brain. Other team members monitor the ailing heart on an electrocardiogram which indicates quivering, ineffectual beat on tape. Five minutes after the alarm, the full team of nineteen doctors and nurses crowd into the patient's room. The anaesthetist continues oxygen applications, the doctors go on with massage and monitoring the electrocardiogram. Since the victim's momentarily-stopped circulation allows acid to build up in his blood, nurses inject him with sodium bicarbonate to neutralize the acids. The patient is still alive, but now the doctors must face

the critical challenge of restoring a normal heartbeat. All eyes intently watch for the climax in "Code 99" team's battle to save a heart attack victim. The wiggly lines on the electrocardiogram tape show what was most feared: the wild random quivering of the heart muscle called fibrillation. The organ is racing so fast it cannot pump blood. Now a doctor must try a drastic technique: shocking the heart into action with ajolt of electricity. He quickly puts two insulated electrodes on the patient's chest and everyone steps back for a moment. Mter making sure he is touching neither the patient nor the bed, the doctor turns on the current for a tenth of a second. The patient's limbs twitch, his body arches, and finally he relaxes. Immediately the nurse and doctor resume respirating and massaging, but all Continued on page 36

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY CHARLES

COURTESY

LIFE

OF

HARBUTT


In the strenuous but vital process of keeping the brain alive, a doctor begins massage of the patient's heart. Placing his hands on the breastbone, he depresses and squeezes the heart against the spine until blood flows into arteries.


The suspense and anxiety are over: a life has~been saved. attention is riveted on the electrocardiogram tape. A student nurse bites her lip; young interns wait and watch. Then after an interminable moment, a new line appears on the graph. Its peaks are irregular, but they are there. A human heart is once again beating on its own. It is exactly fifteen minutes since "Code 99" was broadcast and the immediate emergency is over. The patient is alive, perhaps for years, perhaps for another day. He reaches out to the steady hand of a student nurse, still wearing electrodes wired to two different electrocardiogram machines. Otherwise, there is little evidence of the feverish activity which filled the room minutes before. The "Code 99"

team has gone and the patient's recovery is a tribute to their resourcefulness, and a dramatic example of the concerted battle against sudden death that is being fought in hospitals all around the United States. Ward nurses and doctors settle down for an all-night vigil at the patient's bedside. Student nurse Mary Jo Baydala, who had been giving him a back rub just before the attack, is with him again. Now he says: "I'll take you out dancing tomorrow and we'll show them." • Fifteen minutes after sounding of alarm nurse's steady handclasp reassures the man brought hack from threshold of death.



One of the costliest films ever made, My Fair Lady) which is based on Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion) is currently attracting large audiences in India. Capturing all the pungent humour, satiric wit and intoxicating music of the stage hit, it superbly recreates the pomp and grace of a bygone age.

'MY FAIR LADY' Comes to India

s HENRY HIGGINS might have whooped: "By George, they've got it!" They have made a superlative film from the musical stage show My Fair Lady-a film that enchantingly conveys the rich endowments of the famous stage production in a fresh and flowing cinematic form. The happiest single thing about it is that Audrey Hepburn superbly justifies the decision of the producer, Jack L. Warner, to get her to play the title role that Julie Andrews so popularly originated on the stage. It is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and individuality to the film. Other elements and values that are captured so exquisitely in this film are but artful elaborations and intensifications of the stage material as achieved by the special virtuosities and unique flexibilities of the screen. There are the basic libretto and music of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, which were inspired by the wit and wisdom in the dramatic comedy, Pygmalion, of George Bernard Shaw.

A

Rex Harrison, who also played Professor Higgins on stage, stars in film version. Show set new record in New York, London.

Mr. Crowther is film critic for The New York Times. His review of "My Fair Lady" is reprinted on these pages with permission. Š 1964 The New York Times Co.

With Lerner serving as the screen playwright, the structure and, indeed, the very words of the musical playas it was performed on Broadway for six and a half years are preserved. And every piece of music of the original score is used. There is punctilious duplication of the motifs and patterns of the decor and the Edwardian costumes and scenery, which Cecil Beaton designed for the stage. The only difference is that they are expanded. For instance, the Covent Garden set becomes a stunningly populated market, full of characters and movement in the film. And the Embassy Ball, to which the heroine is transported, CinderaIlalike, becomes a dazzling array of regal splendour when laid out on the superpanavision colour screen. In the role of Prof. Higgins, Rex Harrison stilI displays the egregious egotism and ferocity that he so vividly displayed on the stage, and Stanley Holloway stilI comes through like thunder as Eliza's anti-social Dustman Dad. Yes, it is all here, the essence of the stage show-the pungent humour and satiric wit of the conception of a linguistic expert making a lady of a guttersnipe by teaching her manners and how to speak, the pomp and mellow grace of a romantic and gone-forever age, the delightful intoxication of music that sings in one's ears. The added something is what Miss


Hepburn brings-and what George Cukor as the director has been able to distil from the script. Let's just say that Miss Hepburn brings a fine sensitivity of feeling and a phenomenal histrionic skill. Her Covent Garden flower girl is not just a doxy of the streets. She is a terrifying example of the self-assertion of the female sex. When they try to plunge her into a bathtub, as they do in an added scene, she fights with the fury of a tigress. She is not one to submit to the obscure refinements of a society that is alien to her. But when she reaches the point where she can parrot the correct words to describe the rain in Spain, she acknowledges the thrill of achieving this bleak refinement with an. electrical gleam in her eyes. And when she celebrates the male approval she receives for accomplishing this goal, she gives a delightful demonstration of ecstasy and energy by racing about the Higgins mansion to the music of "I Could Have Danced All Night." It is true that Marni Nizon provides the lyric voice that seems to emerge from Miss Hepburn, but it is an excellent voice, and everything she mimes to it is in sensitive tune with the melodies and words. Miss Hepburn is most expressive in the scenes where she achieves the manners and speech of a lady, yet fails to achieve that one thing she needs for a sense of belonging-that is, the recognition of the man she loves. She is splendidly beautiful and comic in the satiric Ascot scene which is played almost precisely as it was on the stage. She is stiffly serene and distant at the Embassy Ball, and almost unbearably poignant in the later scenes when she hungers for love. Mr. Cukor has manoeuvred Miss Hepburn and Mr. Harrison so deftly in these scenes that he has one perpetually alternating between chuckling laughter and tears. Mr. Harrison's Higgins is sharper, more spirited and eventually more winning than I recall it on the stage. Mr. Holloway's Dustman is Titanic and when he roars through his sardonic paean to middleclass morality in "Get Me to the Church on Time," he and his bevy of boozers reach a high point of the film. Wilfred Hyde White as Col. Pickering, who is Higgins's urban associate; Mona Washburn as the Higgins housekeeper, Gladys Cooper as Higgins's svelte Mama, and, indeed, everyone in the large cast is in true and impeccable form. e To the role of Eliza Doolittle, Audrey Hepburn brings great histrionic skill and "a fine sensitivity of feeling."


The Columbia River Treaty, signed by the U.S. President and Canadian Prime Minister in September

1964, symbolizes the friendship between two nations co-operating

projects of mutual benefit. The river originates in Canada

in many

and flows into the U.S.

THE LONG BORDER OF PEACE SIX MONTHS AGO the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada met at the International Peace Arch at Blaine, Washington State, on the U.S.-Canadian border, to ratify the Columbia River Treaty between the two nations. The treaty provides for benefits to both the United States and Canada in the development of hydroelectric power, flood control and utilization of resources along a river which has its source in British Columbia and flows through both countries before entering the Pacific Ocean. The signing of the Columbia River Treaty symbolized once again the close co-operation and friendship which has existed between the United States and Canada for many generations and which has found tangible expression in joint projects of mutual benefit to the two countries. A notable earlier example is that of the St. Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959, which links the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and has led to considerable development of seaborne traffic during the last five years. His visit to Blaine and Vancouver for ceremonies connected with the Columbia River Treaty was President Johnson's first trip outside the United States after assuming his office. Addressing Canadians on the occasion he remarked: "The treaty we proclaim will lay a new foundation of prosperity for Canadians and Americans, your country and mine, your West and ours .... Our ties are old and strong. We are at once neighbours, friends, partners, and allies."

A

BOUT

President Johnson greets Americans and Canadians at Blain, Washington, when he visited the city to ratify the Columbia River Treaty. Ill, r;J-

It is indeed a tribute to this good neighbourliness and friendship that between the United States and Canada runs the longest unfortified international boundary in the world-a 3,986-mile line that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The boundary touches thirteen American States and seven of the ten Canadian provinces, and the forms it takes are as varied as the lands it divides. It is a dirt road on a western range, a Great Lakes lock system, a spatter of paint on the door of a barn on an eastern farm. It reaches into the clouds around snow-streaked peaks; it slices through spruce forests and billowing wheatfields; it cuts across back-yards and bisects village streets; it weaves between river islands, and teeters along the dizzy brink of Niagara Falls. A few old fortifications, long disused, still stand along the border. Now turned into museums and designated "historic sites," they are visited by people from both countries. Families picnic in the pleasant parks which surround most of these old forts. Traffic streams steadily in both directions across this tranquil frontier. Travellers need only pause briefly to answer the questions put by border officials. At intervals along the boundary are 145 official crossing points, each with a Canadian customs and immigration station on one side of the line and its American counterpart on the other. A joint commission, appointed by the two governments, supervises the operation of these border ports of entry. More than one hundred million crossings made each year are reported by this dual string of international border stations. Despite the great volume of business, border officials keep the traffic flowing so smoothly that a traveller can generally pass from one country to another with a delay of only a few minutes. Though the customs officers are concerned mainly with large shipments of freight, they do not overlook individual travellers. On either side of the border, the questions are likely to be the same: "Where were you born?" "Where are you going?" "How long do you intend to stay?" Or, "How long have you been away?" "Did you buy anything?" Or, occasionally, "Please open the trunk of your car." Huge quantities of freight pass from one country to the other. The United States is Canada's biggest customer and the bulk of the southbound freight is made up of Canadian newsprint, wood pulp, lumber, wheat, minerals, farm produce, furs Continued on page 42

Niagara Falls, famous for grandeur and beauty, are on CanadianUnited States border. At right are 167-foot American falls.



and fish. But the United States also supplies the major portion of Canada's imports. Most important is heavy machinery, such as farm equipment, automobiles and automobile parts. Some of the border customs ¡-stations have separate buildings for handling freight. Buffalo, New York, on the northeastern shore of Lake Erie, is one of the crossing points where traffic is heaviest. Vehicles coming from Atlantic seaboard states or provinces often cross into Canada there and take a short cut across the Ontario peninsula to get to Detroit, Michigan, and the U.S. Middle West. Detroit, hub of the U.S. automobile industry, also is a border city and another of the busy crossing points. But border stations where traffic is exceptionally heavy are not necessarily always at large cities. In 1962, more than 99,000 crossings by vehicles and 274,508 by persons were recorded at the small town of Northport, located just south of the Washington State-British Columbia line. Blaine, a tourist and agricultural trade centre on the main route between Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, is another example of a small town with much border-crossing traffic, and Pembina, a North Dakota farming community situated sixty-five miles south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is yet another. The stations vary from impressive, solidly constructed buildings, with covered runways for automobiles, to simple huts, or even a trailer by the roadside. Some remote posts where traffic is infrequent shut down early in the evening and the lone customs-immigration official leaves a sign instructing persons who wish to cross the border to check with him in the morning. The millions who cross the u.S.-Canadian border include, among others, businessmen, workers, students, tourists and shoppers. Americans and Canadians find the proximity of the two countries and the ease of travel between them are conducive to visiting. The fine national parks in both countries attract campers. Climatic differences also playa part in the international exchange of visitors. In winter, while American sports enthusiasts may go north to Canada to ski and hunt and fish, Canadians are heading south to seek warmth and sunshine in the southern United States. Both Canadians and Americans rent or own summer cottages across the line, in New England or in Canada's lake country. Canada sends more students to American universities and colleges than does any other country, and many American students are enrolled in Canadian institutions of higher learning. Harvesting crews cross from one country to the other according to the season. Men and machines move south for the early harvest in Texas or north for the late one in Canada. Lumbermen also work on either side of the line, wherever jobs are available. An international ploughing match is held each year on the border. Thrifty housewives find it pays to cross the border to shop for certain items on the other side. In the berry season, families in Quebec drive to New England for a day's outing, picking basketfuls of fruit. In some places, churches and their congregations are on opposite sides of the line, so that Sundays are marked by a flow of persons going to and from services across the border. For the residents of many towns on either side, the boundary is an invisible line, almost forgotten. Derby Line, in the U.S. State of Vermont, and Rock Island and Stanstead, in the Canadian province of Quebec, are typical of dozens of such communities. These three small towns share in culture and basic neces-

sities, including their fire equipment. The electricity for Derby Line comes from the Canadian side of the border. Water for Rock Island and Stanstead comes from Holland Pond in Vermont. Along the eastern, older section of the frontier, there were until recently about one hundred houses straddling the line, most of them built before the boundary was marked. There are still several of these "line houses" in the Derby Line-Rock Island community. The free library, for instance, sits squarely on the line and is endowed in both countries. The bookstacks are in Canada, the reading room and librarian's office are in the United States, and a floorboard marks the boundary. In the old opera house, the audience is seated in the United States, while the actors perform on the stage in Canada. Local wits assert solemnly that on one occasion a customs permit had to be obtained before a stagehand could push the piano across the platform. In the Rock Island barber shop, customers await their turn in the United States, and have their hair trimmed in Canada. A row of nails set in the brick wall serves as the boundary marker. The living rooms of two houses on Caswell Avenue, in Derby Line, are in two countries. More than one farm has outbuildings and fields in both the United States and Canada. Children in these towns go freely back and forth to schools and playgrounds, and both young and old to their social gatherings, for community interest makes for an informality and a lack of bureaucratic procedures in the regulations applying to border crossings. Yet, for those who know where to look, the boundaries are visible. A forty-foot swath cut through the lush forests by Canadian and American crews is one marker. An inconspicuous post south of the Tomifobia River is another. This peaceful, unfortified border did not happen by itself. It was brought about through the untiring efforts of British, American and Canadian statesmen, men who were ready to apply good will and common sense to solve their countries' mutual problems. The boundary line has been the subject of at least seventeen different treaties, conventions and protocols. In the early years of the settlement of North America, a chronic hostility existed between the French Catholic settlers of New France (Quebec) and the English, predominantly Protestant, settlers in the thirteen colonies to the south. After the American Revolutionary War, the Treaty of Paris in 1783 established the boundary between the new American Republic, which had won its independence, and Canada, which remained loyal to Britain. Canada at the time of the treaty consisted of the provinces of Nova Scotia and Quebec; the United States was a confederation of the thirteen original States. Those American Loyalists who had opposed the Revolution were forced to leave their homes in the United States. They fled to Canada, where they founded the provinces of New Brunswick and Ontario. Their natural anti-Americanism coloured Canadian political thinking for generations. The boundary between Canada and the United States was determined by the principle that both nations should have equal access to the water routes. That is why the line twists and turns as it follows the rivers connecting the four Great Lakes which both Canadians and Americans had shared from the time they settled the area. From Lake Superior the boundary continued westward for about 500 miles, as far as Lake of the


Forty-foot swath, cut through dense forests by Canadian and American crews, marks one section of the long U.S.-Canadian border.

Living rooms of two houses in Derby Line on the border are, like this one, in two countries. Broken line on photo indicates the border.

Woods. There it stopped, far beyond that point all was still unexplored wilderness. The peace that followed the Treaty of Paris was uneasy. A series of border incidents between Americans and Canadians led to the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. This indecisive war continued until the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. Two years later, the United States and Great Britain (the latter speaking for the Canadian people) took the first major step towards establishing an unfortified frontier. The United States, which had suggested disannament on the lakes as early as 1783, made the proposal again, and this time it was favourably received. By the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, both nations agreed to limit the armed vessels of either side on the lakes to the size needed for police and protection against smuggling. Fortifications w;::renot mentioned, but there

The Washington Treaty in 1871 settled a boundary dispute over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the chalmel south of Vancouver Island. What was of far greater importance, Canada and the United States agreed to disarm their entire frontier permanently. Since 1871 the border between the two nations has truly been an unfortified frontier. Of the many agencies which handle U.S.-Canadian affairs, the International Joint Commission, created by the two governments in 1909 to deal with the many problems cOlmected with boundary waters, is the most important. It is this commission, also, that supervises operation of the official border stations. A network of co-operative agencies has been set up at all levels to discuss other matters of mutual concern, and the two countries have collaborated in developing a joint defence system, including radar lines in northern Canada. Canadian and American towns along the border feel so losely related that they often Joln in celebrating each other's national holiday. At the eastern end of the boundary? Calaisl MaIne, helps St. Stephen, New Brunswick, celebrate on Dominion Day, July 1. Three days later, St. Stephen joins Calais in the festivities for the Fourth of July. As monuments to the amity and trust existing between the two nations, peace parks have been created at several places along the border. At the eastern end, the Canadian island of Campobello, once the summer home of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, has been designated as international park. Situated off the coast of Maine, it will be administered by a U.S.-Canadian commission. In the centre of the continent, in the scenic region of the Turtle Mountains, the 2,200-acre International Peace Garden State Park sits astride the Manitoba-North Dakota line. Still farther west is the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park,

Wa5no longer any wII need to maintllin mlv9.1 BiHe~ t"-1lt w~uld have to be fortified. SOffit! oth!!r boundal'y llU~ liB -th b rder between the State of Maine and the province of New Brunswick, and the line between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods-were settled by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. One of the most difficult p::riods in Canadian-United States relations was between 1844 and 1846. At that time the boundaries were fairly well defined except for the strip between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. Both nations had vital interests in the Oregon Territory that lay beyond, Canada through the fur trade and the United States because thousands of her citizens had settled in the disputed area. The fixing of the boundary became a burning political issue and brought on threats of war in 1844. Fortunately, the dispute was settled peaceably by the Oregon Treaty of 1846, by extending the boundary along the 49th Parallel. In 1867 the four Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec were organized as the Dominion of Canada. While retaining loyalty to the British Crown, Canadians gained freedom to govern their nation independently of England, and assumed responsibility for their own welfare. (Canada is a charter member of¡,the British Commonwealth of Nations. She became an independent state in 1931).

in

w~i<rll i\QjilJ\f(il1tnational parks in A.lberta and Montan1l

have been merged. And at Blaine, on the Pacific Coast, the Peace Arch referred to earlier, marks the border. Within the arch are two open doors. They bear an inscription expressing the pride and faith of two peoples in a partnership of peace that is based on mutual respect, friendship, co-operation and trust. The inscription reads: "May these gates never be closed." •




Development plans reflect city's efforts to integrate new buildings with historic structures.

social health of the nation's great urban centres, the Congress in 1949 passed a pathbreaking housing act which committed Federal funds to the job of clearing slums. Under this act, cities were empowered to designate blighted areas-that is, areas of below-standard housing or unsightly commercial or industrial structures-and to purchase these properties for new buildings and new uses. The Federal Government, in turn, once it approved the city's choice cf area and its plan for redevelopment, would pay the city two-thirds of the difference in cost between acquiring and clearing the land and reselling it to private builders. Two years later, spurred by the agitation of the various citizens groups and by the prospect of Federal aid for planned redevelopment, Philadelphia's voters overwhelmingly approved a new city charter. One of its most important features was the inclusion in the City Council of councilmen representing the whole city and not just small districts. Under the new set-up, the Council had every encouragement to consider the city's over-all problems of development. Philadelphia's new leaders decided that the most obvious need was to clean up the central area, while at the same time working out plans to improve neighbourhoods throughout the city. A citizens group had already been busy developing a programme to clear out the slums surrounding historic Independence Hall. Federal aid made it possible to demolish the most decrepit buildings around this national shrine. Then the State of Pennsylvania agreed to pay for a three-block-long mall stretching northward, giving the fine old building the setting it had long needed. Today Independence Mall is one of the city's prime attractions for visitors. The clearing of most of the slums around Independence Hall, and the creation of open, green spaces provided the impetus for new commercial and residential building in the area. The city has taken advantage of this opportunity by supporting a new apartment development called Society Hill, and encouraging existing residents to refurbish the older, but still sound, houses. This area just east of Washington Park has shown the most remarkable transformation of any in the city as more than 500 old houses have been rehabilitated and new apartment towers and individual town houses have sprung up. What was once a blighted area has now become one of the city's premier residential neighbourhoods. The Society Hill project also demonstrates the determination of the city to get the highest level of design and aesthetics into its new developments. To ensure such quality, the city sponsored a competition for the land at Society Hill and two developers were finally selected, both agreeing to spend one per cent of the total cost of the project for sculpture, mosaics and other art to be part of the development. Internationally renowned architect Ieoh Ming Pei was chosen to design buildings for both developers. Once thoroughly aroused, citizens joined forces in a variety of organizations aimed at different phases of redevelopment. Caught up by what was happening, many individuals made remarkable changes in their own property. The Gogolski family, for example, had been living in an older house near Society Hill, but had never realized its historic value until they were persuaded to tear off its false facade. This operation exposed a fine old brick exterior, of the sort that made early Philadelphia famous. While citizen activity was stirring around Washington

Square, another group under the leadership of advertising executive Harry Batten started work on a prodigious redevelopment effort-the clearing of the old Dock Street produce market. For many years, the Dock Street market had been a festering sore in the city's hide, with its surrounding slum and crumbling warehouses. Traffic congestion in the narrow streets was so bad that trucks making deliveries sometimes had to wait for hours to pass. It was stifling commerce-and hurting the whole city. Within five years, the old Dock Street market was cleared to make way for part of the Society Hill project and at the same time an impressive new Food Distribution Centre was created on the site of the former dump. Aside from the obvious aesthetic features of these projects, the city gains over $1,500,000 annually in taxes from the prospering facilities at the new wholesale market, whereas the old Dock Street market had earlier returned only 17,800 a year. Philadelphia's businessmen also began to think about the redevelopment of the area immediately adjacent to City Hall, the hub of the central metropolis. For many years the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the city's most powerful businesses and biggest landowners, had talked about tearing down its "Chinese Wall"-a thirty-foot high embankment of tracks and switches. But, during the years when do-nothing was the order of the day, the railroad postponed its plans. Finally, however, planner Edmund Bacon and architect Vincent Kling came up with plans for the razing of the wall and the creation of a new commercial centre. The railroad agreed and a Board of Design was named to co-ordinate and oversee planning. Today Penn Centre, with two office buildings, a transportation building and a hotel stands as a somewhat partial success. Planner Bacon, whose original plans were partially altered in the necessity to get backing by businessmen, believes the project is successful even though admitting that some of the buildings are not of the first rank architecturally. Penn Centre does represent a pioneering effort to separate the pedestrian from auto traffic by providing a pedestrian concourse below street level, punctuated with gardens and connecting easily with train and subway transportation. Even more ambitious plans are underway to extend this concept of protected pedestrian walks to the main shopping area east of City Hall. Here a promenade and elevated sidewalks will bring shoppers directly into the five big downtown department stores as well as to the bus term¡inals, subway stations and auto-parking garages hidden from but adjacent to these pedestrian walks. The general success of Philadelphia's opening attack on the problems of the central city made the needs in the rest of Philadelphia more apparent than ever. After a great deal of soul searching, the planners and housing experts decided on a new direction for city redevelopment. The programme was to be focused on the rehabilitation and conservation of existing housing, on industrial redevelopment, and on improvement of the areas around the city's great universities. It reflected the realization of the city's leaders that redevelopment had to be more comprehensive and on a bigger scale than had been originally envisioned in 1949, when the first projects were launched. The programme won the support of the public which continued to vote in the reform party at each election. The first phase of the new programme, housing rehabilitation, required the highest level of citizen participation. A great deal of the city's housing at the time was either old, deteriorated


or both. The Philadelphia Housing Association made a strong demand that all housing over twenty-five years old-about seventy per cent of the total inventory-be subject to some form of urban renewal treatment. At the least, this involved more rigorous inspection to check violations of the housing code. At its most ambitious, the programme called for complete rehabilitation of existing homes. Philadelphia's shift in emphasis from clearing residential slums to rehabilitating areas that were not yet slums reflected a growing feeling that isolated stabs at slum clearance could not significantly upgrade the city's total housing stock. When the area around it remained bleak and unattractive, the new housing often began slipping towards the slum level, besides being hard to rent. The planners were learning that it is not the condition of the housing alone that makes slums, but the total environment of the neighbourhood and the actions of the people in it. The Federal programme changed significantly in 1954, permitting payments for rehabilitation of housing on the same basis as slum clearance. For its part, Philadelphia began to direct more of its effort to upgrading housing on the periphery of the central area. The worst areas in the centre itself were not Continued on next page

Slums surrounding the historic Independence Hall (bottom of picture) were early rejuvenation targets of citizen groups in i952.

Development of three-block-long mall, new office and residential buildings gave independence Hall area dignity Gnd spaciousness.

~



AN UNCOMMON 'COMMON MAN'

H

EwAsBORNonMarch15, 1767,and when he died seventy-eight years later he left behind an America that would for ever reflect his strength, determination and democratic spirit. One of the most colourful and tenacious figures in American history, Andrew Jackson is famous for the great victory he won at the Battle of New Orleans against the British in 1815. The victory hurtled him into the national political arena and he became the first frontiersman to reach the pinnacle of the Presidency. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, Jackson lived a roisterous backwoods life until he became a lawyer, entered public life and served in the national Congress as both Representative and Senator. Defeated for the Presidency in 1824 by a Congressional caucus, Jackson organized the Democratic Party in 1825 and won the Presidential election of 1828. For the next eight years, the "people's president" dominated the American scene as no President had before him. Jackson clashed with the vested and local interests on a variety of issues-and won nearly all the battles. Because he considered the United States Bank monopolistic, undemocratic and unconstitutional, he vetoed the bill for rechartering it-and his veto was upheld by Congress. When South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union, Jackson acted swiftly. "To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union," he told Congress, "is to say that the United States is not a nation." To make sure South Carolina understood his message, he underscored it by sending troops and war ships to the harbour of Charleston, the capital of South Carolina. The State did not secede during Jackson's time. After serving two terms in the White House, Jackson returned to his Tennessee home in 1837. Nearly destitute and chronically ill, his last days were filled with visitors and photographers who came to see the old hero and to record his craggy features for posterity. He was the first President to be photographed; the picture at left was made a few weeks before his death on June 8, 1845.



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