“[H]as there ever been another place…where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested…?”
—Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

An Unquiet Search

The disconnect between the public perception of Modern architecture and those who design it—between the Bauhaus and our house—is well documented in literature. Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1982), was among the first to offer this perspective to the general reader. Coming as it did at Post-modernism’s zenith and the very nadir of Modern architecture’s obloquy, it seemed to architectural types the literary equivalent of piling on, albeit with wit and insight. Frank Gehry’s public rant at an Oviedo, Spain news conference is a much more recent indicator that there remains a sizable gap between what architects think the public should love and what the public chooses to hate. Mr. Gehry, who has never been mistaken for a thoughtful or self-aware person, flipped the finger at journalists while carping: “98 percent of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit!”

A century after Modern architecture emerged in Europe where it was often connected to social programs, the revival of craft traditions, and improvements to hygienic practices ranging from the scale of the human body to plans for entire cities, this gulf seems to have grown. Rank-and-file Americans have yet to accept Modern architecture, especially domestically.

Here in Knoxville we have a fine collection of exceptions to the rule of normative residential construction. One can find “mid-mod” houses in the hills of Holston and Sequoyah, and peppered throughout the neighborhoods of Bearden, Westmorland, and South Knoxville. They were designed by a range of talents, some very skilled and locally well known, such as Ben McMurry and Bruce McCarty.

Billy M. Glenn

The Little Switzerland enclave in South Knoxville, designed and developed by Alfred and Jane Clauss, the latter of whom was the first woman to work in the atelier of the Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier, is one of Knoxville’s less-heralded Modern architectures. Its covenant still requires that all structures built there be “of the so called ‘modern style’.” Their Hart House (1943) on Holston Hills Road, considered an important part of Le Corbusier’s American legacy, just recently sold with the assistance of Knox Heritage. None of these houses, however, altered the character of the housing market in the region; they remained exceptions to the rule rather than changing it. Moreover, when it comes to resale value, when mid-mod houses go on the market in this region, real estate agents and owners typically find it more difficult to attract (non-architect/artist) buyers than for a traditional house of comparable size and location.

In 1960, more than a generation after Le Corbusier built the Villa Stein – de Monzie (1928) and the Villa Savoye (1931), which together became icons of a movement that did not yet have a name, he published Creation Is a Patient Search, with an introduction by the great 20th-century art collector Maurice Jardot. Little more than an overview of his creative activities of the previous 40 years, it written in a disquieting third person, its author referring to himself as “L.C,” the initials of his nom de travail. Yet, for Le Corbusier and virtually all significant architects of that first generation, the search for a Modern architecture was anything but patient, marked by all of the anxieties wrought by an unsated hunger for what the critic Robert Hughes called in his BBC series and book of the same name, The Shock of the New (1980).

The still-young L.C. was so desperate to realize his vision of a new architecture that he wrote a long letter to Monsieur Savoye begging him to choose the design with the flat roof he envisioned for the family’s vacation villa at Poissy, just outside Paris. Ultimately, the Savoyes relented. Le Corbusier got the architecture he needed. It is arguably his most famous house and it remains a paradigm of excellence for all young architecture students. As for the Savoyes, they were left with an entourage of unhappy contractors unpaid for additional work, and a roof that never stopped leaking, especially each autumn and spring. As the Nazis advanced on Paris, the Savoyes abandoned the house, never to return.

Who Buys This Stuff?

There has always been a small cadre of aficionados of this thing called Modern. Before the Villa Savoye, in the mid-1920s, Gertrude Stein’s brother Michael and his art-collecting-wife Sarah (an early and important supporter of Henri Matisse), commissioned Le Corbusier to design a villa for them and their friend Gabrielle Colaco-Osorio de Monzie at Garches, just outside of Paris. They lived in the villa on and off, known colloquially as “Les Terrases,” owing to its many vegetated balconies, until around 1937 when the Steins (along with de Monzie and her daughter) returned to the United States.

For the most part, the patrons of Modern architecture are the usual suspects: architects (but not all), and a subset of what Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” One would think it would be universally popular among Bohemians and liberal elites, such as the Steins and the Savoyes, but not necessarily.

Hollywood set designers were and remain a mainstay of the modern architect’s client base. Although it is more correct to say that they are their own clients as most production designers are educated as architects. This helps explains why in many procedural television dramas one can find $4,000 Mies van der Rohe chairs or $2,000 George Nelson lighting fixtures in a New York City police captain’s office or FBI conference room.

Films from the 1930s through the mid-century sport starkly modern homes and interiors of all sorts. This generally holds true today for both films and television commercials and even print ads, especially for automobiles where one often finds iconic modern buildings as backdrops for the newest model vehicle. Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles wallpapered several television car ads of the past decade alone. More recently, the home of the character played by Vince Vaughn in the HBO series True Detective is a starkly modern house sporting large open spaces, furniture with clean lines, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, and a flat roof. When the character falls on hard times, he and his wife must move back into his conventional early-20th-century bungalow: an architectural sign of failure. Keanu Reeves as the title character in the film John Wick is a fearsome hitman living in an isolated, glassified modern house furnished with Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs. For both characters, the lack of enclosure signifies they need no protection as they have nothing to fear. But of course, they do, and therein lies the drama.

An excellent example in clear view on Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills is the elegant-if-humorless steel and stone house designed by McMurry-the-Younger (BarberMcMurry Architects, 1955) for doctor Harry Jenkins and his wife (part of the 2015 Tennessee AIA annual convention’s tour of mid-century modern houses). Most of the mid-mod houses in Knoxville were for this sort of professional, particularly expatriates, as longtime Knoxvillians tended to favor far more traditional domestic fare.

The institutional and commercial client base for Modern architecture in Knoxville was much broader than was the domestic side. Fine period pieces are hidden throughout the city in plain sight: West High School on Sutherland Avenue and the Fort Sanders School. The Sequoyah Hills branch of the public library is a much later, but also fine, modest example. Bracketed between Scenic and Neyland Drives along Kingston Pike, one can enjoy an outstanding collection of variegated Modern architectures in service of a range of Judeo-Christian religions: Heska Amuna Synagogue, Laurel Church of Christ, First United Methodist Church, and Temple Beth El.

Not long ago, Richard Neutra’s famous Kaufmann House (1946) in Palm Springs, Calif. was the setting for one of J. Crew’s seasonal catalogs. That same year the New York Times used Brazil’s space-ship-modern capital Brazilia as the backdrop for its Sunday Magazine’s annual men’s fashion issue. It’s curious how the same people who would never live in a Modern or mid-mod house willingly purchase merchandise identified with its iconic imagery. There are some who love to hate Modern architecture and then there are those who hate to love it, but they love it nonetheless.

When the Jenkins House was still new, the Fort Sanders School was under construction, and the country was still emerging from its wartime chrysalis as the reinvented imago of post-war power, there was a brief moment during which a certain subspecies of Americans embraced a new modern paradigm, from how they dressed to how they dressed the buildings they inhabited. It’s invigorating to recall that Knoxville was squarely in the midst of this moment. Home to the TVA, only a few hours distance from the re-invented Bauhaus at Black Mountain College, and cheek to jowl with the Secret City at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, these were fertile fields for modernity in America. This seems worth remembering.

Corrected: Mr. Gehry’s name was misspelled.

George Dodds

George Dodds’ Architecture Matters explores issues concerning the human-made environment, primarily focused on Knoxville and its environs. He has been teaching and publishing commentaries on the practice and history of architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture for over 30 years. He has practiced in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., has lectured internationally, and has served on the editorial boards of several journals. Since 2000, he has been on the faculty of architecture at the University of Tennessee.