The ‘Name’ Building in a Virtual Era

CBS’ renewed effort to sell its “Black Rock” Manhattan headquarters, a symbol of the news organization’s dignified modernity for nearly 40 years, highlights architecture’s role as a “signature” art. Since the late 19th century, and coinciding with the rise of the skyscraper in Chicago and New York, corporations used architecture as a way of identifying themselves to the public. From the Woolworth Building in the 1910s to the AT&T; Building in the 1970s, style and design quality have provided a physical advertisement of a corporation’s taste and power.

The CBS Building was no exception. Designed by architect Eero Saarinen in 1961, its austere profile--with deep-set, black mullions rising directly out of the pavement--gave it a gravity aspired to by the TV network. It epitomized William S. Paley’s vision of what CBS could and should be. Saarinen was a master of signature buildings, having also designed the birdlike TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport and the machine-like Bell Telephone research labs in Holmdel, N.J. Though CBS is intent on selling Black Rock, it seems hard to imagine the building with another identity.

Yet, corporations, increasingly global and lacking ties to any particular city or area, require fewer and fewer stable locations. If they are concerned with architecture and building sites, it is more likely the architecture of their software and the design of their Web site than with any bricks-and-mortar structure. Where corporations were once preoccupied with displaying their identity with a monumental building, now this is achieved virtually.

The shift has occurred over several decades. IBM and AT&T;, for example, have already moved out of their own signature headquarters. But the 21st century will be noted by architectural historians as the period when architecture finally lost all connection to corporate representation, save for its role in the advertising display of recreational facilities, as with Las Vegas or DisneyWorld.

The idea of a building conveying a message about its owner is not new: Power and luxury were traditional attributes of palaces and churches. But the notion of a building crafted specifically for a distinct entity, an institution or business, dates only from the late 19th century. The phrase “speaking architecture” was coined in the late 18th century by French architects wanting to use design to further Enlightenment ideals of reform and revolution. Architecture, claimed architects like Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the 1780s, should “speak to the eyes,” conveying the substance of its owner’s occupation in its form. Ledoux designed an imagined city, filled with factories with windows that represented their products; barrel-shaped houses for those who made barrels; drain-pipe-shaped houses for water engineers. He theorized architecture would shape and be shaped for every function of the new industrial society. Then the 19th century turned Ledoux’s utopia into reality, when institution after institution, from museums to factories, turned to architecture as a confirming and authorizing art.

By the end of the 19th century, corporations were quick to seize on the potential of modern structures, especially the new high-rises, to mark their own rise to prominence. Thus, the Chicago Herald Tribune held a competition in 1923 for “the most beautiful office building in the world,” and all the leading traditional and modern architects of the day submitted designs. The most notable was produced by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, a skyscraper in the shape of a huge Doric column, punning on the double meaning of newspaper and architectural column. In Los Angeles a few years later, Robert Derrah gave dramatic shape to the Coca Cola Bottling Plant and the Southern Counties Gas Co. buildings; and Gordon Kaufmann outshone the Beaux Arts winner of the Chicago competition with his monumental moderne Los Angeles Times Building.

After World War II, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought modernism to the United States in the pure form of the Seagram Building; his young collaborator, Philip Johnson, went on to cause almost as much of a stir with his “Chippendale” cap to the 1984 AT&T; Building. It was not uncommon for entire architectural firms to dedicate their output to forging corporate identity across the country, from Lever House in New York to the John Hancock Center in Chicago. Skyscrapers vied to differ from each other in form and height, shaped like pyramids, cylinders, ovoids, trapezoids, and with distinctive caps--conical, pyramidal, pedimental. It could be said that high-quality architecture and corporate identity were synonymous from the 1900s to the 1980s.

But now, a corporation’s new identity as a citizen of the World Wide Web has changed the architectural stakes. Today, the tendency is to build not signature objects, but generalized real estate. Developments take the names of their districts. Century City is a prime example: Towers are generic, easily relabeled according to need and new owners.

Abandoned to the vagaries of the market, however, what will become of the once-powerful signature buildings? History seems to confirm that both architecture and the original patron wins over any future owner: The Woolworth Building is still the Woolworth Building; the Chrysler Building, despite many changes in ownership, is still the Chrysler Building; the AT&T; Building remains indelibly attached to its former owner; and the CBS Building will, no doubt, be referred to, more or less affectionately, as Black Rock for some time to come. In Los Angeles, the former Southern California Edison Building, by Allison and Allison, with its carved motifs of energy, light and power, remains a symbol of 1930s belief in progress; the May Company Department Store building will always resist, in name at least, its new role as annex of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.

The idea of a “signature” building, however, has not been without complications for the creation of good architecture. Indeed, the central problem of modern architecture has been to balance the visual need for corporate or institutional advertisement against the requirements for a finely conceived spatial place of life and work. Certainly, the best of modern corporate buildings were not mere advertisements, but advances in the art of modern architecture itself--Lever House, now being carefully restored, and the CBS Building are notable examples. But as Loos’ “column” project for the Chicago Herald Tribune ironically pointed out, and many built projects of the “postmodern” 1980s demonstrated, taken too far, a signature can easily become a caricature.

In the wake of corporate withdrawal from signature sites, architects will surely continue to build office buildings--but less for specific corporate identities than for general serviceability, less for image than function. For some time now, the burden of image making has been reserved for those institutions that still, in an increasingly virtual world, possess real objects for display, or, as in the hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, where buildings are required to be little more than three-dimensional advertisements. Indeed, museums and casinos have now become the signature buildings of choice, from Richard Meier’s Getty Center and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, to the Luxor in Las Vegas.

It is perhaps not accidental that museums, both in management and style, seem increasingly to follow the corporate model, while casinos and resorts strive to gain respectability, often by amassing collections of art works. Perhaps the only solace for architecture is that, like their predecessors, these new museums will retain their original identities when changing hands--with New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Getty, in whatever future guise, whether financial institution or spa, remaining seminal works of modern design, indelibly attached to their first names. *