In Scotland when the temperature rises above 75 degrees there is talk of heat waves and the newspapers publish photographs of panting polar bear and disheveled penguins. Being of this lineage i found the American summer to be absolutely intolerable--yet it was on the hottest and most humid of days in 1949 that i found myself in New York examining at first hand those few emblems of a modern architecture which were thought in Cambridge at that time to be symbols of the salvation of the world.
My companions and i scrutinized the Museum of Modern Art garden, the United Nations and Lever House as well as other projects which almost acquired distinction and, by the end of the day we were footsore, tired, sweaty, grubby, crumpled and thirsty. We came to the last project, a brownstone conversion by Philip Johnson. We passed through the bland facade into a small vestibule and immediately left both heat and glare behind. We move into a large and handsome living room, the end wall of glass subtending a small court defined by a guest wing. This was dominated by a pool with three stepping stones, a small fountain, a single aralia tree and on the white painted brick walls, a tendril of ivy. We stood on a narrow terrace beside the pool, savoring the silence, then discovering below it the small noises of the trickling fountain, drips and splashes, the rustle of the delicate aralia leaves, seeing the reticulated patterns in the pool, the dappled light. Here were these selfsame precious things, but consciously selected and arrayed, sun and shade, trees and water, the small sounds under silence. What enormous power was exerted by these few elements in this tiny space. They were not antagonistic to the city or to man but indispensable ingredients of a humane environment. Equanimity, health and introspection could live here.