Ayn Rand and King Vidor's film The Fountainhead: Architectural modernism, the gendered body, and political ideology

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 310-332

  Schleier, Merrill ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949877831     PISSN: 00379808     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/991785     Document Type: Review

References (122)

1. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York, 1943; repr. with afterword by Leonard Peikoff, New York, 1993). Several versions of the screenplay (1944-48)are housed, with other material concerning the film adaptation of The Fountainhead, in the WBA. For this paper I have mainly used the final version ofthe screenplay, which is dated 20 June 1948.
2. For earlier discussions of the novel and film, see Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (London, 1969);
3. Kevin McGann, "Ayn Rand in the Stockyard of the Spirit, " in Gerald Perry and Roger Shatzkin, eds., The Modern Novel and the Movies (New-York, 1978);
4. Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture and the Movies(New York, 1986);
5. Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York, 1986);
6. Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simon, King Vidor: American (Berkeley, 1988);
7. Patricia Neal, As I Am: An Autobiography (New York, 1988);
8. Julian Petley, "The Architect as Ubermensch, " in Philip Hayward, ed., Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists(London, 1988);
9. John Walker, Art and Artists on Screen (Manchester, 1993);
10. See also Ayn Rand, The Illustrated Fountainhead, with drawings by Frank Goodwin (n.p., 1945; repr., Marina del Rey, Calif., 1998);
11. James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York, 2001).
12. For interdisciplinary treatments of Rand, see Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Philadelphia, 1995);
13. Chris Sciabarra and Mimi Reisel Gladstone, eds., Feminist Interpretationsof Ayn Rand (Philadelphia, 1999);
14. Jeff Sharlet, "Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars, " Chronicle of Higher Education 9 (Apr. 1999), A17-18.
15. Studies of the interaction of architecture and space with gender have asubstantial bibliography. Among many works, see Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity, " in Vision and Difference:Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London, 1988);
16. Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, 1990);
17. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill, 1990);
18. Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women (Berkeley, 1991);
19. Elizabeth Grosz, "Bodies-Cities, " in Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton, 1992);
20. Elizabeth Wilson, "Bodies in Public and Private, " in Jane Brettle and Sally Rice, eds., Public Bodies-Private States: New Views on Photography, Representation and Gender (Manchester, 1994);
21. Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, eds., The Sex of Architecture (New York, 1996).
22. For discussions of the construction of masculinity, see Michael Kimmeland Michael Messner, Men's Lives (Boston, 1989);
23. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity fromthe Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993);
24. Laurence Goldstein, ed., The Male Body (Ann Arbor, 1994);
25. Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, 1995).
26. See also Melissa Hardie, "Fluff and Granite: Rereading Ayn Rand's Feminist Aesthetics, " in Sciabarra and Gladstein, Feminist Interpretationsof Ayn Rand, 363-89.
27. Ayn Rand, "To the Readers of The Fountainhead, " pamphlet, c.1943, Box 20, File 8, pp. 1-8, ARA. This pamphlet served as a publicity vehicleto respond to the fan mail Rand and her publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, received.
28. The New York Public Library bibliography included: Lewis Mumford, Sticksand Stones (New York, 1924);
29. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York, 1926);
30. W. A. Starrett, Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Than (New York, 1928);
31. Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (London, 1930);
32. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York, 1932);
33. Alfred Bossom, Building to the Skies: The Romance of the Skyscraper(London, 1934).
34. The Architect's World bibliography included: Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1924);
35. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (New York, 1936);
36. Walter Behrendt, Modern Building (New York, 1937).
37. Edward Gunts, "The Fountainhead at 50, " Architecture 82 (May1993), 36.
38. David Harriman, ed., The Journals of Ayn Rand (New York, 1997), 117.Harriman silently omits portions of Rand's notes. Some omissions are moreegregious than others. For example, Rand took notes and made comments on Wright's An Autobiography, of which Harriman reproduced only part, on pp. 118-22of Journals of Ayn Rand. Box 52-66B, File B, ARA, contains the originaldocument. Here is a passage quoted by Harriman: "He gets a commissionbecause the client saw in his houses 'the countenance of principle.' Lack ofgeneral response to his work after a period of intensive labor, day and night -should before the word 'Lack, ' 'Suggestion of a German aesthetic professional togo to Germany because America was not ready. Wright decided to stay had futurein America.'"
39. Rand, The Fountainhead (1943), 592.
40. Paul Starrett, Changing the Skyline: An Autobiography (New York, 1938), 284-85.
41. Coleman Woodbury, ed., Housing Officials' Yearbook 1937 (Washington, D.C., 1937)
42. Branden, Passion of Ayn Rand, 4 (see n.1).
43. There is much research to be done on Rand's cinema work both in Russiaand after she emigrated to the United States. The ARA houses her earlycommentaries on cinema. See Ayn Rand, Russian Writings on Hollywood, ed. Michael Berliner (Marina del Rey, Calif., 1999).
44. Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Twilight of the Goddess, " New Yorker, 24 July 1995, 70-81;
45. Archie Ogden, "Original Report on Ayn Rand's 'Second-Hand Lives, '" c. 1943, Box 93, File 1, p. 1, ARA.
46. "Architecture and Love in Mix-up, " Cue, 19 July 1949, 22.
47. Bosley Crowther, "The Fountainhead, " New York Times, 9 July1949, 106.
48. George Nelson, "Mr. Roark Goes to Hollywood, " Interiors 45(Apr. 1949), 106-11.
49. Ted Criley, "The Fountainhead, " Journal of the A.I.A. 12 (July1949), 27-31;
50. Aline Mosby, "Real Architects Flunk Colleague Gary Cooper, "Louisville Courier-Journal, 28 July 1949, sec. 2, 9.
51. Other reviews include: "The Fountainhead, " Time, 11 July 1949, 95;
52. John McCarten, "Down with Beaux-Arts, " New Yorker, 16 July1949, 46;
53. "Movies: The Public Be Damned, " New Republic, 18 July 1949, 41;
54. "The Fountainhead, " Newsweek, 25 July 1949, 76;
55. Philip T. Hartung, "Lust for Lust, " Commonweal, 29 July1949, 390.
56. Miriam Hansen, "Ambivalences of the 'Mass Ornament': King Vidor's The Crowd, " Qui Parle 5 (spring-summer 1992), 102-9;
57. Chipp Rhodes, "Filling the Void: Work and the Modern Subject in King Vidor's The Crowd, " Studies in the Humanities 20 (Dec. 1993), 115-24.
58. For a discussion of New Deal images that merge political and genderpropaganda, see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public An and Theater (Washington, D.C., 1991);
59. Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural Study of Post Office Murals (Minneapolis, 1982).
60. See Michael Kimmel, "Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832-1920, " in Goldstein, The Male Body (see n. 2), for a discussion of the various paradigms of masculinityin turn-of the-century America, including the "Genteel Patriarch, " the"Marketplace Man, " and the "Heroic Artisan."
61. Lewis Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Man and Machines(New York, 1932; repr., Rochester, 1977), unpag.
62. See also Freddy Langer, Lewis Hine: The Empire State Building (New York, 1998).
63. See Harriman, Journals of Ayn Rand, 219 (see n. 8).
64. Ayn Rand, "A Speech to Architects, " c. 1943 or 1944, quoted in Objectivist Forum (Dec. 1985), 10-14, ARA.
65. Cheney, New World Architecture, 15, 85, 92 (see n. 6).
66. Ayn Rand, journal entry, 2 Dec. 1935,
67. in Harriman, Journals of Ayn Rand, 85.
68. Ayn Rand, "The Only Path to Tomorrow, " Committee for Constitutional Government, 1945, condensed from the essay "The Moral Basisof Individualism, " 1945, Box 1, Folder 6, p. 2, ARA.
69. Rand, The Fountainhead (1943), 92 (see n. 1).
70. For a discussion of the figure of the courageous, risk-takingconstruction worker, see Ernest Poole, "Cowboys of the Skies, "Everybody's Magazine 19 (Nov. 1908), 641-53.
71. Rand, The Fountainhead, final screenplay, 13 (see n. 1).
72. Still photograph 707-681, Fountainhead Material, WBA. Lobby cards sent totheaters showed these images and had captions such as "No man takes what'smine!" and "How much temptation did you think a man couldstand?" See This Is a Warner Bothers Campaign, Warner Brothers publicitypacket, 1949, 24 pp., ARA.
73. For the former, see esp. Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (New Haven, 1983),
74. Branden, Passion of Ayn Rand (see n. 1).
75. On Carrere, see Dietrich Neumann, ed., Film Architecture: Set Designsfrom Metropolis to Blade Runner (New York, 1996).
76. According to Zeynep Çelik, Sullivan borrowed extensively from Islamic ornamentation, especially in Dankmar Adler and his Transportation Building (1893) at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For example, heemployed a hierarchical treatment of surface elaboration from planar to complexornament, which is common in Islamic architecture. Çelik points out that Sullivan's search for ornamental motifs from the Orient displayed hisdissatisfaction with classical sources. He sought a more egalitarian approach toornamentation, which he believed must be an organic part of the design of abuilding rather than simply affixed to the surface. See Çelik, Displayingthe Orient (Berkeley, 1992), 171-75.
77. Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York, 1947), 29, 46. Kindergarten Chats was originally published in serial form in the Interstate Architect and Builder's News between 16 Feb. 1901 and 8 Feb. 1902. Itwas first published in book form in 1918.
78. Rand, The Fountainhead, final screenplay, 6.
79. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 64, 75-79, 129.
80. Mary Mcleod, "Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity, " in Deborah Fausch, Paulette Singley, and Rodolphe El-Khoury, eds., Architecture in Fashion, (New York, 1994), 39-123.
81. See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
82. For a discussion of architectural discourse and its borrowings frompsychiatry, see my "Lewis Mumford's Gendered and Classed Modernism, "Architectural Theory Review 3 (Nov. 1998), 1-16.
83. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 91.
84. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist (New Haven, 1996), 79-158.
85. Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 82 (see n. 6).
86. Wright, An Autobiography, 7, 36 (see n. 6).
87. Wright, Modern Architecture, 85 (see n. 20);
88. Wright, An Autobiography, 371.
89. Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesin 1 (Oct. 1940), unpag. In An Autobiography, 261, 371, he expressed his contempt for the American Institute of Architectsand the Federal Housing Association.
90. Neumann, Film Architecture, 126 (see n. 56).
91. For further discussion of the influence of Wright on the set designs, see Saint, Image of the Architect (see n. 56).
92. See Karal Ann Marling, "A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurologyand the Historical Myth, " Prospects 4 (1979), 421-40;
93. Steven Gelber, "Working to Prosperity: California's New Deal Murals, " California History 58 (summer 1979), 98-127.
94. Rand, "A Speech to Architects" (see n. 41).
95. Lewis Mumford, "The Intolerable City, " Harper's Monthly 152(Feb. 1926), 283.
96. For a comprehensive discussion of Mumford's more than decade-long attackon the skyscraper, see my Skyscraper in American Art, 93-97 (see n. 18).
97. Edmund Wilson, "Progress and Poverty, " New Republic, 20 May1931, 14.
98. For a further discussion of the popular and critical disaffection withthe skyscraper during the Depression, see my Skyscraper in American Art, 119-21.
99. Bossom, Building to the Skies, 65 (see n. 6).
100. Roland Marchand, in Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley, 1985), 240-42, discusses how the businessmen's gaze dominated the new man-madelandscape. He claims that the Olympian perspectives from their officesrepresented a visualization of their power and fantasies of dominion.
101. Vidler, "Framing Infinity, " 51-63 (see n. 42).
102. Arnold Lehman, "The New York Skyscraper: A History of Its Development, 1870-1939" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974);
103. Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl Condit, The Rise of the News York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven, 1995).
104. Harriman, Journals of Ayn Rand, 231 (see n. 8).
105. Rand, The Fountainhead (1943), 180, 283. Jennifer Bloomer points out thatin Aristotle's biological model, man's semen is active and his blood warm, while woman is passive and cold. Rand considered herself a disciple of Aristotle.
106. See Jennifer Bloomer, "The Matter of the Cutting Edge, " in Bloomer, ed., Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary (London, 1996).
107. For a full discussion of the feminine/masculine architectural dichotomy, see Beverly Gordon, "Woman's Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age, " Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1996), 281-301.
108. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899), 179.
109. See my "Lewis Mumford's Gendered and Classed Modernism, " 1-16(see n. 60), for a discussion of Veblen's influence on architectural modernistdiscourse.
110. Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood(Minneapolis, 2000), 142-48.
111. Rand, The Fountainhead (1943), 217, 283.
112. For a discussion of this theory, whose popularity began in 1931 with Freud's essay "Feminine Psychology" and continued into the 1940s, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York, 1975).
113. Durgnat and Simon, King Vidor, 261 (see n. 1).
114. Branden, Passion of Ayn Rand, 144.
115. Woodbury, Housing Officials' Yearbook and Current Developments (see n.13).
116. For a thorough treatment of American public-housing policy during the Roosevelt administration and beyond, see Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago, 1996). Harold Ickes'sstatement appears on p. 94.
117. See also Harry C. Bredemeyer, The Federal Public Housing Movement: A Case Study of Social Change (New York, 1980); "Public Housing" (see n.12);
118. C. W. Short and R. Stanley Brown, Public Buildings: A Survey of Architecture of Projects Constructed by Federal and Other Governmental Bodiesbetween the Years 1933 and 1939, with the Assistance of the Public Works Administration (Washington, D.C., 1939);
119. Catherine Bauer, A Citizen's Guide to Public Housing (New York, 1940);
120. Richard Pommer, "The Architecture of Urban Housing during theearly 1930s, " JSAH 37 (Dec. 1978), 235-64.
121. For a discussion of this campaign, including a list of all theorganizations that supported the National Real Estate Board, among them, the American Institute of Architects, the United States Chamber of Commerce, andvarious banks, see Bredemeyer, Federal Public Housing Movement, 127-48.
122. Hine, Men at Work, unpag. (see n. 34).