Wallace Kirkman Harrison (b. 1895 in Worcester, Massachusetts, d. 1981 in New York City) and Max Abramovitz (b. 1908 in Chicago, Illinois) belong to the generation of architects marking the transition between Beaux-Arts and modernism in American practice. From large-scale collaborative design and planning projects for government agencies and universities to corporate office buildings and private residences, much of their work melds forms introduced by leading modernists, such as Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Le Corbusier. Yet, when free of the restraints of collaboration and client demands, both produced original and imaginative work, often inspired by engineering in their innovative techniques and uses of material.
Harrison received his training as a draftsman for architectural and construction firms, supplemented by part-time study at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Boston Architectural Center, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1920-21). A Rotch Traveling Scholarship (1922) supported two years in Europe and the Middle East. After 1916, Harrison worked for several New York architects: McKim, Mead and White; Bertram Goodhue; Raymond Hood; and Harvey Wiley Corbett, with whom he studied and later taught at Columbia University (1925-26). In 1927, he became a partner in Helmle and Corbett. Their Roerich Museum and Master Apartments (1929) in New York and collaborative work on Rockefeller Center featured masonry-clad slab towers that had setbacks characteristic of New York office buildings between the wars and that prefigured Harrison’s mature work.
Abramovitz received degrees in architecture from the University of Illinois (B.S., 1929) and Columbia University (M.S., 1931), where he also taught design. He became a student of Harrison’s in a housing study group at the New School for Social Research, New York City, in 1931. A postgraduate scholarship from Columbia afforded two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1932-34). In 1934, Abramovitz joined Corbett, Harrison and MacMurray (1929-35; later Harrison and Fouilhoux). Abramovitz became a full partner in 1941. Following Fouilhoux’s 1945 death, the firm became Harrison and Abramovitz.
Harrison and Abramovitz ran a progressive office resembling the ateliers and design studios of their youth. Despite conventional educations, both became committed modernists by the late 1930s. At Yale University (1939-42), they helped rejuvenate the design and planning curricula. Their design studios hosted such visiting artists, planners, and architects as Le Corbusier, José Lluis Sert, Lewis Mumford, Robert Moses, Amedée Ozenfant, Ferdinand Léger, Alexander Calder, Oscar Nitzchke, and R. Buckminster Fuller. Their firm soon became a magnet for talented young designers.
A consummate diplomat, Harrison’s ease in handling the complex demands of multiple clients for business, institutions, or government secured a broad client base, resulting in many high-profile commissions. His genius for forming key liaisons with powerful, well-placed individuals extended the scope of the firm’s business both locally and internationally. Harrison’s friendships with Robert Moses and members of the Rockefeller family helped him execute important buildings at the United Nations (1946-52), Lincoln Center (1956-66), and the Empire State Plaza (1961-77) in Albany. These jobs led to other commissions, especially politically sensitive ones, such as the U.S. Embassy buildings, designed by Abramovitz, in Havana (1951) and Rio de Janeiro (1952), and the CIA Headquarters (1961) in Langley, Virginia. Abramovitz attained multiple commissions for educational institutions: the Law School at Columbia University, 16 buildings (1951—70) at Brandeis University, a library and student residence (1966-70) for Radcliffe College, and the Krannert Performing Arts Center (1969) and the Assembly Hall (1963) at the University of Illinois.
For Harrison, collaboration was a typical and successful working method, but in his work for Nelson Rockefeller at Albany, it proved a liability. From 1961 to 1977, he was involved almost exclusively in the design of the Empire State Plaza. Dubbed “Halicarnassus on the Hudson” by one critic, its angled slab office towers, egg-shaped performing arts center, and monumental cultural education center betrayed a loss of artistic control typical of bureaucratic design. Inspired by Le Corbusier's Monastery of La Tourette and Oscar Niemeyer’s work in Brasilia, the ensemble lacks subtlety of detail and the originals’ sureness of form.
Under more favorable circumstances, the firm produced such highly original structures as the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair (1939-40) and Harrison’s fish-form First Presbyterian Church (1958) in Stamford, Connecticut. Harrison felt freest to explore new ideas in domestic architecture. His fascination with circular forms emerged in designs such as his Milton House (1936) in Bermuda, where rooms radiate out from a circular core. For Nelson Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation, Harrison designed 1,500 experimental low-cost reinforced-concrete houses (1953) for Las Lomas, Puerto Rico.
Both architects contributed novel solutions to the design and planning of tall office buildings, often adapting industrial materials in remarkable ways to relieve the monotony of the slab form.
Two such postwar office towers in Pittsburgh also displayed to advantage the products of their clients. At Alcoa (1952), Harrison designed luxurious modular aluminum cladding for the exterior. At U.S. Steel (1971), Abramovitz supported the triangular tower with hollow external members providing uninterrupted office space on all floors. These Cor-ten steel members, filled with antifreeze and water, created structurally stable fireproofing at significantly reduced costs. At the United Nations Secretariat (1950), Abramovitz transformed the Le Corbusian slab into an Americanized curtain wall heat-reducing glass by Libbey-Owens-Ford. The firm’s work for Corning Glass over two decades, beginning in 1949, included a Visitors’ Center and several office buildings with lavish expanses of glass. Links with producers of key building materials contributed to their role as one of the leading corporate design firms of the postwar period.
From the mid-1960s, with Harrison occupied nearly exclusively by his work in Albany, Abramovitz produced the majority of the firm’s other designs. This long separation eventuated in the dissolution of the partnership in 1976. Abramovitz retained the firm as Abramovitz, Kingsland, Schiff while Harrison practiced independently.
Linpa S. Pxipps
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
