The chain-smoking Hungarian architect Roland Wank came to New York by steamship in 1924, a fact which tends to be overlooked by those who track the trans-Atlantic movements of Modernism as a viral infection, looking for carriers and sources and regarding architects like Schindler (smuggled in 1914) and William Lescaze (drifted over 1920) and Neutra (imported 1923) like individual spores before the widespread outbreak in 1931 brought back from Germany by Typhoid Philip. Wank arrived in 1924.

Despite its unhealthy and debilitating decades-long grip on architectural history and its wit-dimming effects, though, Modernism is not like a disease.

It's more like cholesterol. There is good cholesterol, see, and bad.

 

In any case, the unfortunately named Roland Wank was a walking talking Euro-Modernist in 1924, there's no doubt about that. He'd been born (1898) and educated in Budapest, graduated (1922) from the Technical University of Brno, lived in Vienna for a time, and came to the US.

Working for the New York City firm of Springsteen and Goldhammer he produced the "Amalgamated Dwellings" in 1930, worker housing down on Grand Street on the Lower East Side, still proudly standing there, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the worker housing of Red Vienna - brickwork, central courtyard. And working for Fellheimer and Wagner in 1931 he got co-credit with Paul Philipe Cret for the design work on that gorgeous late train station Cincinnati Union Terminal.

By 1933, the first year of the New Deal, Wank got hired by the government as a town planner for the expansion of a Tennessee village called Norris. Norris was for displaced country people. Their land was going underwater. Remember the end of O Brother Where Art Thou?

One day Wank's boss asked him to come over and 'take a look' at something. The boss was David Lilienthal, the young and ambitious first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the three Roosevelt appointees with sweeping power over the 201 counties in the Tennessee River drainage basin. TVA was a government within a government; Lilienthal was a little king. This 'something' in Lilenthal's hands was the plans for the very first TVA dam, the concrete Norris Dam, worked up several years previous by Bureau of Reclamation engineers and inherited by Lilienthal. 'Taking a look' meant Wank got out his red pencil collection and came back to Lilienthal two weeks later with a complete and radical Euro-Modern redesign of Norris Dam.

His boss loved it. The engineers, however, did not appreciate the intrusion. They were pissed off. Maybe because "Roland Wank" sounds like something you'd shout out of a moving car.

There was an argument. To settle the argument, the TVA sent a cable to Detroit and asked for an opinion from the Lord High Great Guru of industrial architecture to see which he liked better, the engineers' plan, or the Euro-Modern Roland Wank plan.

 

The Guru in question was Albert Kahn. Kahn was born in Germany and came to the United States at age 11 and went to work instead of school. He founded an architectural firm in Detroit before 1900 and had his first success in 1904 for the Packard company using a construction technique he had learned in Germany: reinforced concrete. Kahn always developed the technical needs of the factory floor through measurement and observation and research, and then fitting the buildings around those activities.

Some of his buildings were asymmetrical. Gasp!

Not to try to explain his whole career, but the car makers liked Kahn's attention to their needs and they gave him dozens of commissions. That's how he got to be the High Priest of Functionalism.

His office was responsible for the General Motors skyscraper headquarters in Detroit, the colossal Ford River Rogue plant, and many more massive steel-and-concrete industrial projects around Detroit that became icons of industrial Modernism as examples of honest and muscular and straightforward design. (By the way, he also had a great deal to do with successfully industrializing Soviet Russia. With the blessing of both Henry Ford and the U.S. government, Kahn went to Russia in the early 1930s and built approximately 500 factories, until the day when they tried to pay him with rubles, and he went home.)

Beyond all that Kahn was also partly responsible for establishing the whole Modernist aesthetic. His buildings were photogenic enough to assist the careers of Edward Weston and Charles Sheeler and Margaret Bourke-White and others: Sheeler spent six weeks on assignment photographing at River Rouge in 1927. This tended to advance an underlying aesthetic notion that if a thing was built to work, it would automatically become beautiful. Beauty would arrive by itself, a transcendent beauty 'untouched by human hands' if you will, unpolluted by mere style... a machine for living. In the early 1930s there was a good deal of cooing about the honesty and functional purity of water towers for instance. Kahn himself had blunt opinions about modern architecture as an exterior style, didn't consider himself a part of that movement, and didn't hire anyone with any hormonal impulses towards self-expression.

Quote from Brian Carter at the University of Michigan, about the show "Albert Kahn: Inspiration for the Modern":

Kahn's industrial buildings were complex and liberated from tradition, spatially new, and innovative in their construction. They are compelling demonstrations of how form can follow function—buildings designed and constructed like machines that housed the making of machines....

The scale, directness, and simplicity of these buildings inspired architects across the world. Mendelsohn and Gropius both wrote enthusiastically about American architecture before World War I, describing its industrial buildings as the vernacular of the New World. In 1923, Le Corbusier chose to illustrate his inf1uential book Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture) with photographs of Kahn's industrial buildings, and almost twenty years later the architect Mies van der Rohe used one of Kahn's factories as a base for his own work. In documentation, however, Albert Kahn was rarely credited and he remained relatively anonymous in the developing world of Modernism.

So if anybody was qualified to judge the quality of the new Norris Dam design, it was Albert Kahn.

 

So, back to Wank's problem. What was the difference between the two plans?

According to Marian Moffett of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, "Wank felt that the unimaginative and heavy appearance of the bureau's design lacked the simplicity that should characterize TVA work, and he proposed a sculptural recasting of the dam's elements, pulling the powerhouse and spillway face into a coherent composition. Applied ornament on the bureau's scheme was replaced by sensitive massing, carefully proportioned window openings, and the subtle texture of concrete imparted by the formwork boards. Wank tried to make the dam look as functional as the engineers had designed it to be."

In other words, Wank didn't add funtionality, he created the additional appearance of functionality. He hadn't changed the engineering of the Norris Dam one little bit. He changed its composition. Notice the dramatic and asymmetrical overall massing in the photo below, the formwork-marks set at 90-degree angles to suggest a weaved surface, the reduced and simplified (and likely deepened) windows, all these techniques of scale, size, proportion, simplification and texture to suggest tamed thick-fingered brute force.

Oh yeah, there's something else. Wank considered this a public project. Marian Moffett again:

"At his insistence, the landscaping and approach route to the dam were carefully studied, with overlooks provided at appropriate locations so that the visitor would receive the impression of a great work designed in harmony with its site. Furthermore, visitors were invited into the powerhouse itself, where a reception room was furnished with illustrative displays and staffed by information officers to explain the dam's operation. The turbine room, vibrating from spinning electric generators, gave viewers an impression of modernity and technological progress, the first glimpse of a better world opening to people in a relatively backward region of the country. The inscription "Built for the People of the United States" is set prominently inside this and all other TVA projects."

 

Well, Albert Kahn approved of the resdesign. The happy ending to the story is that the chain-smoking Hungarian Modernist architect with the funny name was given the job of Chief Architect of the TVA from 1933 through 1944, creating the public face of a very public program. All his dams -- this one, the Fontana Dam, the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, the Hiwassee Dam -- feel as progressive and powerful and populist as Hoover Dam.

Kahn liked the design so much, in fact, he (well, his office) later collaborated with Roland Wank on the development of "A6" type worker housing for the TVA, yet another story. Wank eventually returned to the New York offices of Fellheimer and Wagner, took over the office of Fellheimer and Wagner, which became the offices of Wank, Adams, Slavin, and they are still around.

For Roland Wank, the man who said, "I could never become interested in designing grand houses for the few who can afford them," three cheers.

By the way did you notice the story of Norris Dam totally contradicts that idea where functional buildings automatically and inevitably achieve their own honest beauty? That's dam silly. We've both seen enough ugly water towers to know better. If somebody ever asks you whether you want a building that looks good, or one that works well, naturally the correct answer is yes, please, both.

"It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road." -- Jean-Luc Godard