46
PARTISAN REVIEW
der Rohe are the iconoclasts of interior partitions and exterior
walls. Using all the power of steel and concrete, they run roof
planes far out beyond columns and curved partitions. They vary
materials so that one plane asserts its independence of another
though all are bound in a balanced composition. Mies Van der
Rohe exploits broad surfaces of marble, opaque, translucent and
transparent glass, curtain and reflecting pool for all they are worth
in careful combination-as decoration. These men use the land–
scape for their canvas.
But it is this sensitiveness to the effects of texture, color, mass
and line which naive materialism strives to eliminate. And its
strident demands have been made not just since the days of the
first World War but since the 'Eighties and beyond. In the time
of Louis Sullivan and John W. Root it seemed to meet the require–
ments of natural functions better than the eclectic products of the
Beaux Arts-trained architects. For what it offered against the
shams of McKim and Burnham, Sullivan argued in its favor, great
as his qualms for its future may have been. But with eclecticism
conquered, it now appears that the course of naive materialism
had been only incidentally functional and that its true aim had
been the reduction of architecture to a standardized profitable
pattern for universal application. When a distinction between these
two once seemingly parallel but now divergent tendencies in archi–
tecture is made, then and then only can we hope to know how to
combat the hideousness which permeates so much of our building.
