Needs of the People

HENRY N. COBB, the new chairman of the Architecture Department of the Graduate School of Design, is not just another academic. Cobb came to Harvard this fall with more than two decades of practical experience--and no teaching--behind him. Unlike some of his academic peers, Cobb has known the pinch and compromise inherent in realizing any design. He demands that architects respond to the possibilities and pressures of society. The best architecture of the past has managed to meet the functional, aesthetic and spiritual demands of the people it serves.

Cobb--a partner in the New York firm of I.M. Pei, is skeptical of architects who, in reaction to social polemics of the Modern movement, have sought to free architecture from its responsibility to society: "Now more than ever, we need to ask what validity, if any, there is in architecture as a social art. Architecture must reflect its context, must speak to the human condition at a certain time and place, while also fulfilling its physical function."

The examples he chooses to illustrate his points are all institutional. The designs meet aesthetic requirements while also reconciling conflicting aims inherent in the programs. Haggia Sophia, a great church constructed in the sixth century, symbolized the stability and unity of Justinian's reign, simultaneously conveying the sense of imcompleteness, anxiety, and aspiration crucial to its function as a place of worship. Palladio's Pallazzo Chiericati in Venice serves a double function as a private house and a border to a public square. Louis Kahn's Salk Institute in southern California provides a communal framework in which scientists can carry out individual research.

The role of the client becomes a crucial factor in any design process. Cobb attributes the elegant sparseness of the Salk Institute to an unrelenting client who "challenged everything--squeezed out everything (in terms of form)--that was not necessary." He contrasts this economizing to Harvard's William James Hall, which looms outside his office window. William James, he says, is "a monstrous form" glazed over with an apparently arbitrary scheme of decoration. The building also fails to meet the conditions of its context: "It makes a horrible statement of the relationship of an institution to the people who are part of the community."

In citing examples of his own work, Cobb emphasizes his desire to make designs fit existing structural and social contexts. One of his designs, the John Hancock Insurance Company building, has been one of Boston's most controversial structures. Located in Copley Square, the Hancock tower in famous for the structural defect which resulted in huge planes of glass exploding off its facade exterior. Even before that catastrophe, citizens were outraged by the arrogance of a private corporation erecting a 60-story office building adjacent to the city's historic heart; the tower stands next to H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church and McKim, Mead, and White's Public Library.

Cobb makes no apologies for the Hancock tower. He admits that it was finally approved for economic and not aesthetic reasons. "It served the vital economic interests of the community that this company should stay in Boston," he states, adding that he "adopted a strategy of minimalism because the situation demanded it. We excluded everything that didn't contribute, in an effort to temper the inherent arrogance of such a building."

Cobb is optimistic about his current project, a design for an art museum in Portland, Maine. Again, the urban context complicates the demands of the program. Cobb's design is an attempt to assimilate the new building into the site: a large brick facade encloses a public square; the stepped levels of the rear connect the vast new structure with the smaller existing museum building. Red brick was chosen to match the vernacular buildings of the city.

Cobb sees architecture as a moral endeavor. He is frustrated by the flippant attitude inherent in much post-modern architecture. In reaction to the strict terms of the modern style, many architects now indulge in haphazard eclectisism. He welcomes the return of the figurative in architecture, the use of forms inbued with cultural meaning and associations. He approves, to a certain degree, of the wit and irony of post-modern designs. He worries, however, that an excess of such levity will weaken the impact of the figurative, resulting in "an unconscious trivialization of meaning." He senses a dangerous carelessness in architects who "casually pick up bits and pieces of history." The wit, the irony, the humor become a way of not addressing the real issues. "The architect must not forget what he is saying, and to whom he is speaking."

THE CREATION of architecturally significant designs goes beyond logical construction and beyond self-conscious intellectualized aesthetics. One must consult one's intuition to understand "the essential distinction between architecture and mere building," Cobb says. His emphasis on architecture as investigation and exploration perhaps best explains why he came to Harvard. His final message is that there is no prescriptive guide to understanding--or discovering--architecture. "You learn architecture by doing it. The process is long, arduous, difficult, and expensive--and absolutely indispensable."