Federal guidelines state that a building must be at least 50 years old for it to be placed on the register. This is a positive trend because Montana has its share of fine buildings in what is referred to as International-style architecture. It’s also necessary because we’re losing modernist buildings at an alarming rate. We seem to exhibit a disdain for the recent past and we’re quick to demolish or remodel these boxy buildings beyond recognition. The loss of significant modernist architecture is being described by historic preservationists as a national crisis.
The International style triumphed in America during the euphoric, post-World War II building boom, a time when a renewed nation demonstrated its industrial and economic might in all types of commercial, civic and domestic buildings. Modern aesthetics called for sleek, Cubist-inspired designs as well as new, more utilitarian applications of industrial materials, including brick, glass, concrete, cut stone and polished metal. The streamlined, pared-down look of intersecting planes and asymmetrical boxes, flat roofs and glass curtain walls came primarily from French architect Le Corbusier but also from the German Bauhaus. The Nazis closed down that progressive Berlin school in 1933 and its leading architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came to America as exiles. Leading American architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson embraced the movement.
International-style buildings are meant to be read like modern sculptures, integrated structures in which all the facades matter. They are not clean slates, allowing us to tag on additions as we see fit. The best examples of harmonious additions to a modernist building on campus are Eric Hefty’s contributions to the Lommasson Center. A thoroughly incongruous one is evident in the addition of historicist gables and dormers to modernist Miller Hall (1965).
Garris Weed designed McGill Hall in 1953 to accommodate Home Economics and Women’s Athletics. It was not a contributing element in the original nomination, but is certainly eligible today. An addition to the south side is currently under way for the Department of Health and Human Performance. Although approved by Missoula’s Historic Preservation Commission last year, this lean-to with a raking shed roof is incompatible with and obscures the clean cubes and horizontal lines of Weed’s original plan and it stands to compromise the integrity of his original design.
Students in professor Michael Monsos’ Historic Preservation class are presently researching and writing Historic Property Record Forms on the modernist buildings with an expanded nomination in mind. With more additions to campus coming, it is important to pause and take stock before we lose another generation of good buildings that evoke a period of growth and optimism and placed the university and state at the forefront of national, indeed international, trends.
H. Rafael Chacón is professor of Art History and Criticism at the University of Montana, a member of the Review Board of the State Historic Preservation Office and the 2007 recipient of the “Dorothy Ogg Award for Individual Contribution to Historic Preservation.”
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