The Fountainhead

It took me a while to figure out what Šaltinis was.  I didn't remember Ayn Rand writing a book about wells or springs.  It was only when my colleague said it was the rage among architects in Lithuania that I  realized it was The Fountainhead she was talking about.   I read it back in architectural school.  We even had a Beaux Arts ball based on the theme, which was kind of funny given that Ayn Rand's defiant architect pits himself against the Beaux Arts style of the time.  It was a good page-turner, but in the end you are left to wonder what it was all about.

Architects are drawn to Ayn Rand mostly because of this novel.  They like the fact that Roark refused to bend to convention.  She wisely set her story in the 1920s and 30s, as by the time she wrote the novel in 1943 Modernism had already crept into the American landscape.  Roark was hounded by a nasty critic Elsworth Toohey, who was determined to destroy his career, but Howard ultimately found a rich patron and iconoclast in Gail Wynand, who commissioned him to design a truly modern hi-rise, but not without a whole bunch of twists and turns in the process.  Wynand struck me as a homage to Hearst.  As I said, it was quite a page-turner, and made into movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

I was never really sure who Rand intended Howard Roark to be.  Conventional wisdom said Frank Lloyd Wright.  After all, she commissioned him to design a house for her, but it was never built.  It seemed to me Roark was modeled after Richard Neutra, a student of Wright, whose minimalistic designs dotted LA.  Rand lived in one of his houses.  But then it could have just as easily been Walter Gropius, as the tower Roark ultimately designed bore striking resemblance to Gropius' famous entry to the Chicago Tribune competition in 1922.  A defiant antithesis to the Beaux Arts style entry that was ultimately selected and built.  I imagine Roark was a composite character.

But, Ayn Rand's book was never really about architecture.  She simply chose it as the medium to explore her own ideas on Objectivism.  She would spell it out in even more objective detail in Atlas Shrugged,  which she published in 1957. Her protagonist John Gault was given to lengthy monologues on the subject.  Fortunately, Howard Roark wasn't so long winded.

I suppose to some degree she found kindred spirits in Wright and Neutra.  Wright had written extensively on his views of architecture, but it was of a more organic nature.  He favored traditional materials.  What gave his buildings a freshness was the way he stripped down his facades, opened up his plans and let a house like Fallingwater literally become part of the landscape.  

Neutra had broken away from Wright's Taliesen school to explore the Modernist architecture that had taken hold in Europe.  After all, he was originally from Vienna, and had briefly worked for Adolf Loos.  Neutra had come to America specifically to study under Wright, whom many European architects  considered The Master at the time.  However, new building materials and new technologies called for a different type of architecture, and Neutra saw European architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe pointing in the right direction with their residential designs.  He designed the Von Sternberg House, which Ayn Rand bought, very much along these lines.

Wright was none too pleased with this direction.  He found this modern architecture banal and brushed off the European architects.  Mies was apparently very disappointed that Wright wouldn't accept a request to visit him at Taliesen.  However, that didn't stop Wright from exploring modern curvilinear forms of his own.  The most famous building in this style was the Guggenheim museum in New York, built between 1956-59, at the very end of his life.  It was as if to say, I could do that too.

I think even some of Ayn Rand's Objectivism crept into Wright's thinking, as it fed his immense ego.  The whole point of this philosophy is to celebrate the "hero" inside of you.  To never let yourself be diminished by a society that favored collectivism and mediocrity.  This of course played right into the hands of Lithuanians who suffered through the Soviet Union.  Rand was no fan of Stalin, and thought the United States was going down the same road with the socialist agenda of New Deal Democrats.  Atlas Shrugged was very much a rebuttal to this form of socialism, and no doubt will soon be translated into Lithuanian as well.

However, the type of businessmen Rand favors are men like Musk, Bezos and Branson, who literally shoot for the moon.  In Atlas Shrugged, her titans of industry eventually dropped out of the mainstream and created their own secret society high up in the Rocky Mountains which Dagny Taggart eventually uncovered in her search for the mysterious John Gault. From the lofty perch they watched America crumble in its pursuit of a false egalitarian society.  Theirs was an unbridled capitalist society represented by a gold dollar that in many ways has become the symbol for political conservatives today.  They didn't believe in any sort of social programs.  This stifled man's imagination and ultimately held mankind down.  You had to fight for your right to be part of this Objectivist society.  Maybe Musk will create his secret society on Mars?

In reading her books, it seems that Ayn Rand's ideal industrialist would never thwart the ambitions of others.  Unfortunately, the industrial titans then and now gobble up competitors before they even have a chance to get off the ground, ultimately creating monopolies that are hard to shake short of revolution.  Once again, we find ourselves in a society very similar to the one in the 1920s where rapacious greed ruled and the only way out was to tax the rich and try to restore some kind of economic balance in society as a whole.  Nevertheless, there are those who still believe the businessman to be the true bearer of moral and ethical integrity, not the government and taxation.

How the architect fits into all this is anyone's guess, other than to create a vision for this super industrialist that captures the essence of this Objectivist philosophy.  I suppose the architect that comes closest to Ayn Rand's vision today is Norman Foster.  His buildings have the right blend of modernist design and "sfumato," as Charles Jenck's liked to call it, which softens the transition between materials and the sky to the point his buildings almost seem to disappear into infinity.