Ironies abound in politics and, it turns out, architecture.  I recently watched the 1949 Warner Brothers movie, The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper as a towering figure of integrity, architect Howard Roark.  The screenplay was written by the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand, based on her novel of the same name published six years before.  

The plot is simple: At great cost, Roark stays true to his principles as philistine clients attempt to sully his design of a minimalist skyscraper by adding a base of neo-classical Roman columns and friezes.

Rand thought she was making an Objectivist statement about geniuses being flummoxed by the world’s plodders and second-raters.  But as she did so, she didn’t realize that she had donned a figurative négligée and slipped into bed with the Bauhaus Boys. 

Roark’s skyscraper, shown early in the film, is a tall rectangle that issues from the ground with no apparent base, then stops abruptly 40 or 50 stories high.  It has absolutely no decorations except for dark, evenly spaced horizontal bands, looking almost like pinstripes, running parallel from the bottom to the top. 

It was pure Bauhaus, the design philosophy of “less is more” that created an architectural form that departed radically from traditional tall building styles.  The old style of a base, column, and top, often incorporating classical or neo-classical elements, was utterly rejected.  In its place were buildings whose beauty did not depend on echoing old architectural forms.  Instead, their daring use of glass, concrete, steel, and aluminum, devoid of decoration, was supposed to make observers marvel at their novelty, clean lines, and brave new architectural direction. 

Rand’s unwitting acceptance of Bauhaus’s design philosophy in some ways made her like the Bolsheviks she so utterly detested and had fled from early in her life.  The commies were looking, like the Jacobins before them, to create a new world.  This meant doing away with the old, destroying the artifacts of the past, Pol Pot–style.  So, subverting ancient traditions of architecture and murdering real and imaginary opponents, the Bolshies set out to build their brave new world.* 

(To her credit, Rand was never into mass murder or mass incarceration.  But with respect to her dismissive attitude toward the old, particularly architecture, she unwittingly slept with the Bauhaus Boys.  They didn't snore loud enough to clue her in to what she was doing.) 

Rand thought her Roarkian high rise displayed the product of an elevated mind, unbeholden to the timid and predictable past.  Bauhausers thought the same.  By erasing the past, a technocratic elite could liberate people with “machines for living.”  These wise functionaries would know best how to accommodate the masses at home and at work. 

Roark’s featureless skyscraper has been imitated it seems endlessly in cities worldwide.  A textbook example is the “XYZ” skyscrapers at 1211, 1221, and 1251 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.  Built in the early ’70s, they are faceless, lookalike monsters, rising hundreds of feet with no trace of individuality or adornment.  They are a testimony to how hatred of embellishment and worship of the rectangle led directly, only 20-plus short years after The Fountainhead, to an aesthetic dead end.  They are the modern age’s clever holding pens, not for cattle, but for the thousands of New Yorkers and commuters resigned to spending their lives serving the faceless corporate masters that Rand so disdained.  

Bauhaus itself was not as pure as it pretended to be.  For example, there's the MetLife Building, which looms above Grand Central Terminal like a giant avenging angel, readying to crush it.  The structure is an unavoidable sight in midtown Manhattan.  (It’s wide enough that if you removed all of the partitions and office equipment, you could play a game of flag football inside it.)  It was co-designed by Walter Gropius, one of the most pious of the Bauhausers, who preached a demanding aesthetic of simplicity, elegant proportions, and restraint from building too large or overwhelming.  MetLife pounded those lofty precepts into fine dust.  What happened was that when the time arrived, Gropius sold his soul to get this commission.  Screw “Less is More”!  Hooray the Giant Payday!  

Later on in the movie, Roark’s house designs show the same modernist bent, with straight lines, industrial materials, and a total lack of reference to previous housing styles.  Rand found these designs bold, emphatic, daring, and new, despite the fact that in Los Angeles, where she wrote the script, local architects like Richard Neutra and Paul Lasko years before had already designed and built the ultramodern house styles she was so goo-goo-eyed for.  

Rand’s preferred architecture did become an example of elite tastes.  But those elites in most cases were wealthy people whose political and economic views differed radically from hers.  Almost all of the intellectual slobs who create Disney films, music-performing slatterns like Lizzo and Madonna (I’m not gonna lay a glove on TayTay), and the kings of high tech who can afford modernist palaces are not Objectivists.  Had she lived longer (she died in 1982), Rand would have come to see how most of Roark’s family of creations passed into second-raters’ hands.

There’s an old saying that you can move so far left that you wind up being far right.  The irony is that the people who occupy those extreme positions don’t recognize how alike they are. 

*Later on, Stalin, a true philistine, canceled the early Soviet Union’s romance with modernism, replacing it with the so-called “wedding cake” skyscrapers you can still see in Moscow and Warsaw.   

Image via PickPik.