Grove Valve & Regulator Company
Grove Valve and Regulator Company. It’s a substantial, foursquare sort of name evocative of an era—the zenith of American industrialism. Equally evocative is the company’s Modernist plant at 6529 Hollis Street, circa 1950. The building is the product of a time when well-intentioned architects believed, perhaps naively, that Modern architecture could provide the foundations of a better society.
Stirring the Doldrums
Many people regard Modernism as simply a dreary style from the 1950s. That’s a pity, for its American roots run far deeper, to a time of great vitality and experimentation: the late nineteenth century. American Modernism was the reaction of a handful of architects to the turgid Victorian styles of the period, which relied on heavy decoration copied from a whole roster of defunct classical styles—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic. These styles were worked and reworked with ingenious variation, yet ultimately with little real originality.
The fresh influx of ideas which finally stirred these architectural doldrums came from Chicago during the 1880s, from such maverick architects as H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan. Richardson drew howls of outrage with his uncouth, rough-hewn Marshall Field Wholesale Store of 1887, which was brutally free of Victorian decoration. In 1889 it was Sullivan’s turn, with his equally impolite Auditorium Building—an imposing structure expressing its multiple uses with unheard-of honesty. It became a monument to Sullivan’s well-known dictum: “Form Follows Function.”
The Antithesis of Victorian
Impressed with the bold new principle of the Auditorium Building, a precocious Welsh farm boy dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and went to work for Sullivan in 1887. His name was Frank Lloyd Wright. By 1910 he had revolutionized American design with what he termed Organic Architecture. It was more a philosophy than a style: natural materials left unadorned; broad bands of glass blurring the distinction between indoors and out; and low, horizontal lines which literally brought man closer to nature. Perhaps most famous of this genre was Wright’s Robie House, built in a suburb of Chicago in 1909, an astoundingly modern design even today. It was the absolute antithesis of Victorian architecture, and most found it shocking. Another twenty years would pass before Modernism would be accepted by the American public.
The impetus for America’s ultimate acceptance of Modernism came, ironically, from Europe, as did the cause of its eventual undoing. During the twenties, Widespread social and political unrest on the Continent had aroused new interest in Socialism. Artists, architects, and writers, traditionally left-leaning, embraced these doctrines as a balm to the many problems of the time.
The Machine Aesthetic
The most famous of these artistic enclaves was the Bauhaus, a German atelier whose hallmark architectural style bears its name. The Bauhaus and others posited an entirely new “people’s architecture” meant to provide the masses with clean, dignified housing, workplaces, and civic buildings, while at the same time, it was thought, raising their moral and spiritual levels. Ornament, rejected as a useless trapping of the elite, was replaced by the so-called “machine aesthetic,” rendering the design of these buildings intentionally stark and severe. Roofs were generally flat, with little or no overhang; windows were treated as surfaces rather than apertures; and walls were left plain and invariably painted an antiseptic white. Such architecture, dubbed the International Style, began to find favor throughout Europe—though not with Adolf Hitler, who closed the Bauhaus in the late thirties and banished its faculty.
Shock Valve
In America, meanwhile, the Depression was in full swing. Perhaps out of a longing for the Good Old Days, Americans remained more comfortable with revival styles than with Modernism. Here, Modern architecture was most successful in buildings such as retail stores and theaters. where its shock value was of commercial benefit; and even this was a hybrid Modernism favoring the geometric ornamentation known as Art Deco, rather than the stark surfaces of the International Style.
It remained until after World War II for Modernism to be whole-heartedly adopted by American architects. Two major schools of thought emerged: one followed the romantic ideals of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Organic architecture; the other, led by the expatriate German architects Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, held rigidly to the doctrines of the International Style.
A Warm Welcome
Grove Valve’s Emeryville plant is a fine example of International Style Modernism, harking from an era when nothing was more symbolic of a company’s commitment to modern technology than a gleaming Modernist factory. The administration wing on the corner of Hollis and 66th Streets, with its crisp wire-cut brick, aluminum sash and smooth stucco surfaces, is a sleek structure which nevertheless extends a surprisingly warm welcome. Lettering above the main entrance announces simply, “GROVE.” The visitor passes through a pair of gates in a screen-block wall and into an immaculately kept garden court before reaching the front doors (such courts were a popular Modernist device, yet due to neglect they are often barren and uninviting places; it is to Grove’s great credit that this garden remains so lovingly tended).
Behind the administration Wing, the manufacturing facility stretches between 65th and 66th Streets and west to the Southern Pacific main line. These buildings typify the International Style ideals: crisp, rectilinear lines; minimal structure; and what seem like acres of glass curtain wall. Along the south frontage in particular, the wall of the huge crane bay presents a vast, transparent grid which rises above the street with mechanical precision.
Disastrous Results
The International Style was especially apt for industrial buildings, since ornament truly had no place in purely functional requirements of modern industry. Yet unexpected problems appeared. The great unshaded walls of glass, intended to allow plentiful natural light, either admitted too much direct sun and overheated buildings. or, in winter, allowed vast amounts of heat to escape. The minimal areas of solid wall made the buildings particularly vulnerable to earthquake damage. And not least, many people found the repetitive, mechanistic forms predictable and oppressive.
In the optimistic heyday of the International Style, however, such problems had not yet come to light. Its proponents genuinely believed that. by discarding every trace of the architectural past, a new and better environment could be built from scratch. This was done quite literally in the Urban Renewal projects of the Sixties. where entire neighborhoods were obliterated and replaced with stark, impersonal apartment towers intended to give every man equal footing. The results. as we now know, were disastrous. It was the furthest thing from the humanistic ideals of Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright.
A Legacy of Mediocrity
What went wrong? One problem was that, unlike Wright’s home-grown Organic architecture, the International Style’s roots were foreign, and were seldom suited to America’s climate or lifestyle. Worse, it was a movement based upon academic doctrine rather than architectural evolution. And perhaps most ironic: because its clean functionalism lent itself to austerity, it was too often copied by architects and builders who passed off miserly design as Modern design. leaving us with a legacy of mediocre buildings.
These problems spelled the eventual doom of International Style Modernism. When well executed, as in Grove Valve’s Emeryville plant, it could be both progressive and humane. But as hindsight has shown, the International Style worked more often in theory than in fact. Good intentions were simply not enough.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
