Arts and Letters

Wallace Harrison was one of the great figures of our profession and our time. During his lifetime, however, though appreciated by clients and the public, he was nearly (until the last year of his life) ignored by architecture critics and architectural intellectuals.

A man of consummate charm, deep interests, and obvious capabilities he was a hard man for us—his younger contemporaries—to understand. His last great work—the Albany Mall—drew silence and even abuse.

Yet we must look again. We were looking in the wrong direction. Wallace was no Le Corbusier, no Mies van der Rohe. He never assumed the mantle of design prophet. He admired the pioneers of the Modern Movement—most especially Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier—and backed their work whenever possible.

But his great gift—why he will be remembered—lay in another direction: the creation and execution, in an unfriendly world, of enormous civic projects. We do not live in an atmosphere that might breed a Daniel Burnham, so he could hardly follow the famous dictum, "Make no little plans"; Harrison was caught in our "little" times. And yet against the grain, he finished Rockefeller Center, he master-minded the United Nations project, he headed the team that built Lincoln Center, he was chief of design and planning with Nelson Rockefeller of the Albany Mall. It would be a poorer New York State without these spacious and spatial monuments.

Try to think, for example, of accent spaces in the city of New York: the Plaza Hotel, City Hall complex, St. John the Divine, Columbia University—but of the last decades, only three come to mind—Rockefeller Center, the United Nations group, and Lincoln Center, and they are all there because of one organizer and leader, Wallace Harrison.

His achievements were not the kind to get headlines in the esoteric art magazines; but the public flock to his monuments. And finally last year the scholarly Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning recognized him with an exhibition. One might say he changed our city more than anyone except perhaps his friend Robert Moses. And better than Moses, he made spaces where one could actually visit.

In addition, though he will be known as our greatest (and by far the most practical) space maker, some of his personal designs will be famous. I pick one: the Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Connecticut. It is shaped like a fish (conscious Christian symbolism?) and made entirely of many colored chunks of glass set in concrete. This glass was designed and manufactured, by no accident one presumes, in Chartres, France. Precast glass-impregnated concrete was a daring and beautiful material to attempt to use for the first time but Harrison had the courage to innovate. And the result: the church is beautiful, and—unlike many of his contemporaries' religious buildings—“church-like."

There is no one on the horizon today with Wally Harrison's ability to whip our small plans into great complexes. There is no one of our generation who can so personally charm and so charmingly encourage art and the art of architecture of those around him as he. We shall miss him sorely.