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PRESIDENT'S LETTER

It is no secret that the recession has hit architecture firms hard. Commissions have dried up, firms have downsized, and nearly all have taken pay cuts to keep the doors open. If history is any indicator, however, this cloud may have a silver lining.

As it turns out, the 1930s may have been bad for business, but it was a good decade for architectural ideas and creativity. During the Great Depression, when clients were few and far between, some architects used the time to reflect on their ideas, write manifestos, apply their craft to the series of social issues that follow economic decline, and build their most important works.

A look at three important architects illustrates the point. During the 1930s, more than 150 projects passed through the drawing board of R.M. Schindler. Many of them were remodels, and about 80 percent of them went unbuilt. However, Schindler used the slow years to refine his ideas and publish his seminal article "Space Architecture" in California Arts + Architecture in 1934. Although Schindler built fewer than 25 houses during the decade, many are among his finest works-including Buck (1934), Van Patten (1934-5), and McAlmon (1935) Residences in Silver Lake.

Despite his tour-de-force in the Lovell Health House in 1929, Richard Neutra's built works between 1930 and 1934 totaled five. Inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's "International Style" exhibition increased his fame, but commissions still were hard to come by. Ironically, in 1931, when Neutra had no commissions at all, his income came from the design of an aluminum bus for Homer Johnson, Philip Johnson's father, and a stakeholder in a partnership between Alcoa Corporation and White Motors.

Neutra filled the extra hours by re-working his ideas on Rush City Reformed with his unpaid interns Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano. From these explorations of how architecture could meet pressing social challenges, came the seminal Corona Bell Elementary School (1935) and a series of affordable housing projects for low-income and migrant workers. Later in the decade, this period of reflection helped Neutra produce his most elegant small houses-Beard Residence (1934) and Miller Residence (1937)-and two large masterpieces-Von Sternberg House (1935) and Brown House (1938).

When the Depression destroyed the growing practice of Frank Lloyd Wright, he turned his energies to further developing Broadacre City, with his ideas about urban decentralization. By March 1932, it was published in the New York Times. During this period, Wright also begins to realize early versions of the Usonian House. At mid-decade, he completed two masterpieces: Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Building.

We can only hope, therefore, that the turmoil that grips the profession today will be used by architect-visionaries to move society forward. Foundations and grantmaking organizations that seek to leverage shrinking endowments and annual giving budgets should consider how these lessons of the past can inform the field today.

Last but not least, there is the lesson of Alfred M. Butts, another jobless architect during the Great Depression. In addition to designing socially conscious projects, such as the Charles W. Berry low-income housing project on Staten Island and the Stanford Free Library in New York, Butts combined his love of chess and crossword puzzles with his skills at model making to invent a little game called Scrabble. After all, there was only room for one Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sian Winship

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