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Now builders must face the problem that the day of the isolated masterwork is drawing to a close. Says the brilliant Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei: "If New York had 50 Seagram buildings, it would still be an ugly city. We just don't get great cities building by building." The need is for far vaster complexes, built to harmonize with the new megalopolitan city scale. In the search for someone to organize the chaos, critics look naturally to S.O.M., the General Motors of architecture, with a record of high performance in everything from its corporate Cadillacs to its economy Chevys.
Philip Johnson, a superb designer and rationalist, tried for a year to work out a slum-community project, then left it "out of sheer disappointment." He explains: "The politics of such projects is nearly impossible. Only Nat Owings would have the charm and patience to get things done." Adds Urbanologist Patrick Moynihan, who serves on Owings' presidential committee to redesign Pennsylvania Avenue: "He is ebullient, competent and devoted—and also a randy rogue, a bandit and a buccaneer. His great ability is to get other people to do good work."
Owings is neither designer nor town planner, but more than anything else an impresario; he frankly states that his role is to act as "the catalyst." And for this his training has eminently qualified him. One who had not been raised in architecture could not pull together the complex forces of clients, contractors, planning commissions and designers. And in bridging the gap between aesthete and politician or businessman, nothing comes in more handy than a touch of boisterous good humor and the forthright logic of the black-dirt belt of Indiana from which Nat Owings sprang. It is a breathtaking leap that the nation has been asked to make in the 20th century—from an era dominated by Main Street to a future seen in terms of megalopolis and megastructure. To a remarkable degree, Owings has grown up with the century.
Miracle in the Cathedrals. He was born in Indianapolis on Feb. 5, 1903, the son of a fine-wood importer. By then, Chicago's Louis Sullivan had refined the steel skyscraper, Frank Lloyd Wright was building his broad-winged prairie houses. For Owings, life was leisurely on a pleasant, tree-shaded side street. He was an Eagle Scout, and shortly after his 17th birthday he won a Rotary Club scholarship to attend the international Scout Jamboree in London, followed by a tour of the Continent. Out of this unlikely sequence of events came Owings' commitment to architecture.
"It wasn't the cities that impressed me," he recalls. "It was those extraordinary piles of stone and the richness, the light, the warmth they possessed—the cathedrals of Notre-Dame, Chartres, Reims, Mont-Saint-Michel." He knew then and there that he wanted to be an architect. "There is a miracle in discovering what you want to do and never questioning it again," he says. "It happens rarely."