A long time ago I watched the movie The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The screenplay by Ayn Rand was based on her novel of the same name, published in 1943. It's kind of a ridiculous movie, mostly to do with the plot and the dialogue. Real people do not talk like the characters in this movie, in which every extended piece of dialogue becomes a speech of great weight and seriousness--a manifesto, a valediction, or some other kind of heavy, even bombastic, address. The acquittal near the end of the architect Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, is completely unbelievable. It carries the movie away into the territory of a bizarre Randian fantasy. Today I read that Barbara Stanwyck wanted the role of Dominique Francon for herself. If she had been cast in that role, The Fountainhead would have been a better movie. I'm certain of that, for Barbara Stanwyck is always worth watching. The plot and the dialogue wouldn't have been any better, though, because Ayn Rand was by accounts uncompromising in those respects. The movie had to be made by her design.
There is something about The Fountainhead that has never quite worked for me. It seems incongruous. What I'm talking about is an apparent inconsistency between the supposed conservatism of the screenwriter and the evident progressivism of her artist-hero. Roark was not intended to be a progressive-type hero. He is supposed to be an individualist against a prevailing and powerful collectivism and conformism. And yet he is determined and uncompromising (like his author and creator) in his modernistic rejection of older and traditional forms, including Gothic forms. He even goes so far as to blow up a housing development that is being constructed contrary to his design. He wants to strip his buildings of all ornament, to build them in effect on the model of Le Corbusier, the German Bauhaus, and other modernist European architects. If I understand Ayn Rand and her philosophy correctly, she could not have sympathized with European modernism in architecture. And in fact she didn't, according to quotations from her in Wikipedia, taken from an essay by Donald Leslie Johnson, published in 2005. I guess the blame for the European-modernist designs of Howard Roark was laid on production designer Edward Carrere. Ayn Rand's original model was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was neither a traditionalist nor a European-modernist. If his style of architecture had made it into The Fountainhead, I don't think there would have been an incongruity. The movie would still be kind of ridiculous, though.
A teller of weird tales referred to European modernism in a story of the 1940s. He was Robert A. Heinlein and it was "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941. (Illustration by Hubert Rogers below.) Heinlein's story is about architecture and four dimensions of space. (It also mentions himself, to whom the author refers as "the Hermit.") I would hazard it was the first place most people who ever heard of the tesseract or hypercube actually read about that crazy shape. Heinlein's fictional architect, Quintus Teal (five is an odd number, a teal is a duck, so "Odd Duck"?), mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and "the Moderns," i.e., modernist architects. He even quotes (or paraphrases) Le Corbusier: "A house is a machine for living." Teal is full of complaints. He says of the Moderns:
all they've done is to abandon the Wedding Cake School in favor of the Service Station School, chucked away the gingerbread and slapped on some chromium, but at heart they are as conservative and traditional as a county courthouse.
The "Wedding Cake School" and "gingerbread" refer to nineteenth-century Gothic architecture, while the "Service Station School" and "chromium" parts presumably refer to the Art Deco or Art Moderne style of the early twentieth. The Chrysler Building in New York City is a quintessential Art Deco construction, but even it has gargoyles as on a Gothic cathedral of yore. Like Howard Roark, Quintus Teal is a visionary. One difference is that he doesn't sabotage his house. Instead, his house sabotages itself.
Heinlein was also a visionary. He perceived that there was a clash between architectural modernism and traditionalism before Ayn Rand did, or at least before her novel was published. His illustration of it was more visionary still, as he carried modernism into the ultra-futuristic territory of science fiction rather than the near-futuristic territory of the real world. I will add that "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'" is a very fun story to read, and it's very funny. You might get more entertainment out of it than you will out of almost two hours of The Fountainhead.
* * *
Modernist architecture was in the news recently when the Barack Obama Presidential Center was opened in Chicago. I say "modernist" but actually "Brutalist" is probably a better description of that construction. Modernism and Brutalism aren't the same thing, but Brutalism grew out of modernism. Brutalism is associated with fascist Italy under Mussolini, but Brutalism was also in the architecture of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe under the communists. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he communist newspaper Daily Worker deemed The Fountainhead to be 'an openly fascist movie.'" I can't say one way or another, but if modernism is a progressivist style, Brutalism originated in modernism, and Brutalism is also a modernist-progressivist-fascist-communist style, then I'm not sure where the ideological lines are drawn when it comes to twentieth-century architecture. Anyway, the Brutalist Obama center looks like it could have come from behind the Iron Curtain. When I first saw pictures of it, I thought of a gun tower on the surface of the Death Star. So, if you go to Chicago and pay your fee, you will be able to witness the workings of this fully operational presidential center.
* * *
On the opposite end of the century from the founding of the Bauhaus, Tom Wolfe wrote a critique of it and modern architecture in general. His critique is called From Bauhaus to Our House, and it was published in book form in 1981. The people on the receiving end of his critique did not like his critique. Go figure. No word on the opinions of Howard Roark and Quintus Teal.
* * *
I was going to close with a gag cartoon that was in The New Yorker in the 1920s or so. Alas, my books are in storage. The cartoon is of Little Red Riding Hood approaching a Bauhaus-style house that looks like a wolf. I don't remember who was the cartoonist. "Little Red Riding Hood" and stories like it are Gothic or Romantic. Modernism, Brutalism, and futurism are more nearly science-fictional. So in that cartoon, the Gothic or Romantic past encounters the science-fictional present and future. Does the wolf of the present-future devour the Little Red Riding Hood of the past? Or does she escape for another day?
Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
