Minor work by a major architect, this hospital dates from 1981 and does not belong to a style. Did you hear me, infuriating peabrained architectural categorizers? It does not belong to a style. It's no style.

It's not Expressionist (whatever that is or was), it's not mid-Century (it's too late in the day), it's not "Blobitecture" (excuse me while I take a vigorous righteous long enjoyable vomit to get that idea out of my body). Seems like you aren't allowed to speak about a building until you're pigeonholed it, snugged it in somewhere on Albert Barr's chart, neutralized it, because if you've categorized it, right, you don't have to think about it anymore. That's the way it works.

This lack of an identifiable style may "pose a problem" for the building. Then again the architect, Bertrand Goldberg, posed a problem too.

Goldberg was born in Chicago and trained at Harvard. In 1932 he was one of the very few Americans to study at the Bauhaus. (Those categorizers are excited by that news, can you hear their mouse clicks? "Oh, Bauhaus.") (They've heard of that.) While in Germany he spent time in the office of Mies van der Rohe, working under Mies's assistant Bruno Walter, and fled to Paris after a dark warning from his cleaning lady. In other words, as a Jewish person, he might have been collected at night or shot in the street.

Then he came back to Chicago. He got interested in prefabrication and industrial design -- things like prefab bathrooms, plywood boxcars, demountable housing units. Through his career Goldberg designed a rear-engine automobile, canvas houses, novelty furniture, standardized prefabricated houses, a mobile vaccine laboratory for the U.S. Government, and collaborated with his friend and fellow 'design scientist' Buckminster Fuller. For instance, in 1938 Goldberg designed a mast-hung ice cream shop:

I don't have permission to reproduce this Hedrich Blessing photograph. I hope they'll forgive me, but it's so damned cute and smart. In 1938 the mast-hung North Pole Ice Cream Shop was an extraordinary leap forward into the potential of mass-produced spaces and using tensile forces -- what would later be known as tensegrity. A sophistcated little ice cream shop, an artifact of What Might Have Been.

Chicago 1938 is the same time and place of George Fred Keck (House of the Future) and Buckminster Fuller (Dymaxion house and car), suggesting a certain common vision. The vision statement would have gone something like this: designing for industrial mass-production, designing to meet the longterm needs of clients and users, designing from first principles every time (as opposed to using stock designs or historical styles or recognizable "branded" styles), in fact designing without a style, designing for the greatest structural strength at the least cost, and there's something about easy relocation and ephemeralization in there too.

Ah, but there was another vision arriving in Chicago from Germany, arriving in the bulky and uncommunicative form of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the popular imagination Mies came to America and brought the Bauhaus with him. When those peabrained categorizers get ahold of the fact that Mies taught at the Bauhaus it's easy for them to think that Mies was Bauhaus or something like that, that it was the same thing. They make a checkmark, they think they have it settled. No. No!

Architectural modernism is like cholesterol. There is good modernism, you know, and bad.

Good modernism is when Bertrand Goldberg designed for industrial mass-production, designed to meet the needs of clients and users, designed from first principles every time, designed for the greatest structural strength at the least cost, designed rationally.

Bad modernism is Mies specifying all custom-made parts and inappropriately expensive materials, ignoring the needs of clients and users in a none-too-humorous way, treating every project as an exercise in Apollonian idealism which amounted to a signature style, designed irrationally while concocting elaborate philosophical defenses.

In this oral history (which is interesting for other reasons) Goldberg says, "Philip Johnson's book had just appeared in 1932 - Hitchcock and Johnson's book The International Style. It was ridiculed at the Bauhaus because it promulgated precisely the thing that the Bauhaus was striving to extinguish - the concept of style, applied style. Architecture, art, painting, photography, dance, theater, literature was supposed to emerge naturally out of society which was recognized as an industrialized society."

The point here isn't that "some people have no respect for Mies", the point is that the mainstream American version of Modernism became what it was born to destroy, a recognizable surface style with no discipline whatsoever. Their buildings looked modern, that's all. (At this point I cast my gaze over to our infuriating peabrained architectural categorizers -- this might be their fault, because they don't understand any building that's not categorized by its appearance first.)

And the other point is that Bertrand Goldberg, this guy, was and is a much better and smarter rightful heir to the ideals of the Bauhaus.