Neither Sculpture nor Decoration

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a short-lived fashion for large-scale concrete sculptural reliefs attached to buildings that were, more often than not, also made of concrete. These reliefs are to be found all over the place, and many have survived from the Soviet controlled countries of Eastern Europe, from Western Europe, and from the United States. Although many of the reliefs now look rather humdrum to our eyes, and today are often overlooked, at the time they received a lot of attention, and a surprising amount of effort went into their creation. Just why artists, architects and clients alike, in a variety of political and cultural situations, should have been so invested with this particular treatment for the surfaces of buildings is worth considering (Fig. 1).

Both figurative and abstract examples occur in all the countries where they thrived, and, superficially at least, one might say that the reliefs were broadly similar across all the regions where they are to be found. Yet we should not assume that they were indeed all the same. Those in the Soviet Union and Soviet controlled Eastern Europe have to be seen in relation to the state control of art, and to the official policy that art was not about individual self-expression, but instead had to represent a shared collective identity. An important part of this policy was the relocation of art from its traditional bourgeois domain, the gallery or the private home, to a collective space that belonged—notionally—to everyone. The outward-facing walls of buildings fitted this purpose well. The particularly high concentration of concrete wall reliefs in Eastern Germany, the GDR, owed something to the GDR’s role as the Soviet showpiece, the place where the achievements of state socialism were most visible to the West—and this included socialism’s artistic and cultural achievements (Figs. 2 and 3).(1) In Western European social democracies, the emphasis was rather different, especially in the period of postwar reconstruction, when for the first time most building was being undertaken by the state or by state agencies: the issue here was to give, in the much-used phrase of the time, “the common man” a sense of identity with, and of shared ownership in these new buildings. There was a strong humanist impulse to this, and the earlier murals often focused upon historical events or local features, as a way of reconciling the newness of the buildings with their occupants’ own personal pasts.

Burgess Street Sheffield, UK (William Mitchell, 1972). Photo by Andrew Pettigrew.

Concrete relief in the city promenade of Cottbus, “The history of the workers movement,” Rudolf Sitte, 1969. Photo by Martin Maleschka, 2021.

Concrete relief in the city promenade of Cottbus, “The history of the workers movement,” Rudolf Sitte, 1969 (detail). Photo by Martin Maleschka, 2021.

In the U.S., on the other hand, more of the commissions came from the private or corporate sector, and the works often had to do with improving the signifying possibilities of architecture, to make it speak more loudly, or more coherently—a tendency parodied by Venturi and Scott Brown in their 1972 Learning From Las Vegas. So, although all these reliefs in different parts of the world may appear very similar, both in their iconography and in the range of techniques developed to make them, their intentions were often rather different, and we cannot assume that they are entirely interchangeable.

Both artists and architects were responsible for realizing the reliefs, though the motives of the two could be different. For architects, at least one reason for their interest in this novel form was, as two British architects writing in 1959 put it, as a “means for mitigating what have been to date considered the objectionable characteristics of plain concrete.”(2) For artists, on the other hand, the appeal of concrete reliefs was as an opportunity to work outside the convention of gallery-based art, and in relationships with others of kinds that did not normally occur in art practice (Fig. 4). In both Western and Soviet-Bloc countries, both abstract and figurative reliefs were common, but in Eastern Europe, where abstract art was not officially sanctioned, the medium offered another benefit, in that it permitted artists the freedom to experiment with abstract forms, since the reliefs could be construed as “decoration,” to which the prohibition on non-representational art did not apply. Architects too welcomed the use of concrete reliefs, because they provided one of the few ways to escape from the monotony of the ubiquitous industrial panel systems to which the demands of soviet production methods condemned them.

Technically, in terms of manufacture, most of the reliefs are prefabricated, consisting of pre-cast sections made elsewhere then brought to the site, and fixed to the building. Many of them are one-offs, designed and made for a particular building, but, especially in East Germany, it was common for reliefs to be made from small units of abstract design that could be repeated and applied in various patterns to any building. More rarely, and this was technically more difficult, the reliefs were cast in situ, and so were integral to the building, and not detachable from it. Nevertheless, some were made on the site, cast monolithically into the building, and are integral to it. Included in this category of “integral” decoration are the walls executed by the Norwegian artist, Carl Nesjar, where designs by Picasso were transferred to the surface of the building by sand-blasting the cement film to expose the aggregate beneath (Fig. 5). As a subtractive process, etching away part of the wall surface, this differed from the process by which most of the reliefs were made of casting within sculpted forms—though Nesjar’s reliefs attracted much attention at the time, and have remained some of the most successful examples of the medium.

Seen in broader architectural terms, the reliefs can be seen as a response to the long-standing expectation that, in modernist architecture, walls would disappear. Against the tendency to dematerialize walls, these reliefs represented an attempt to restore depth and thickness to the wall, so that it might again become an expressive surface. As the British artist William Mitchell, who specialized in concrete reliefs, once remarked, “Those Victorians knew a thing or two. Why not show the thickness of a wall?” (Fig. 6).(3) The reliefs were sometimes compared to the walls of ancient Egyptian temples, whose surfaces were rich with images and hieroglyphs and carried the record of mythological and historical events; the relocation of the Abu Simbel temples as a result of their flooding by the Aswan dam, very much in the news at the time, gave this comparison a particular edge.

Costantino Nivola occupies a particular place within this episode in the history of art and architectural ornament. His architectural works have correspondences to the reliefs produced elsewhere and exemplify some of their features. However, Nivola stands out as the only artist working in this medium, with the exception of Carl Nesjar, whose work can be said to connect with the artistic avant-garde. The majority of artists working in this medium were looked down upon by the artistic elite, who saw their subservience to architecture as compromising. Nivola, on the other hand, was sometimes treated as a model for his success in balancing the relation between art and architecture.(4) Nivola’s entry into the making of architectural reliefs was accidental. Messing around on the beach near his house at Springs, he made shapes in the sand, into which he would pour plaster.

Initially, he seems to have had no intention for these playful, Picasso-like “sandcasts” to be anything other than free-standing sculptures. But a collaboration in 1954 with the Italian architects BBPR on the Olivetti Showroom in New York, for which he made a decorative interior wall in sandcast relief, led him to see the potential for the sandcasts as permanent architectural elements.(5) Several larger scale exterior reliefs followed soon after—the first large one was for the Mutual of Hartford Insurance Company at Hartford Connecticut in 1957 (Figs. 7 and 8). These were made up in sections, cast flat on a bed of sand, steel reinforcement was added to them; they were then lifted, boxed up, and transported. This was a very simple process, and even with the largest reliefs, Nivola did most of the work himself in the yard of his house at Springs, helped just by his family, the odd friend, and a couple of laborers. In the long interview that he gave in 1976, he described the process in some detail, and made much of its continuity with his earlier sandcasts, and its essentially very basic and un-modern technique.(6) Nivola’s development of his own procedure for making his reliefs is characteristic of most of the concrete reliefs in all countries: experiment, trial and error, with each artist devising their own methods. Concrete is a medium that has always, since its rediscovery in the early 19th century, lent itself to artisanal, as distinct from scientific, experiment: its relative simplicity has encouraged individuals with no particular scientific expertise to try out new mixes and surface effects, and the opportunities it offers for experiment has always been one source of its appeal to architects.(7) Yet many architects, while aware of this potential and wanting to exploit it, had neither the time, the resources nor maybe the inclination to do so themselves, and for them the involvement of artists was effectively a means of subcontracting this experimental work to others.(8)

University of York, Derwent College (Fred Millet, 1965). Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Collections.

Oslo, Government Buildings. (Carl Nesjar/Picasso). Photo by Adrian Forty.

William Mitchell Sculpture, Bull Yard, Coventry, West Midlands. Exterior, viewed from the south east. (Grade II, An abstract two-facetted relief mural, of 1966 by William Mitchell). Photo Arcaid.

From the left, Pietro and Claire Nivola, the two construction workers Charles Johns and Giuseppe Ziovecera, Costantino Nivola and Peter Chermayeff, Springs, East Hampton, summer 1957. Courtesy of the Nivola Family.

Where Nivola differed from the majority of other artists making concrete reliefs was in the degree of control that he was able to exercise over the project as a whole. Unlike most of the other reliefs, where the artist was asked to devise a relief for an already designed building, Nivola managed to be in at the beginning of the project, so that the design of his reliefs was part of the conception of the building. Nivola’s success in fitting the building to the relief, rather than the relief to the building, seems to have come about partly because he chose to work with architects who were not especially grand or big names. (The exceptions to this are his collaborations with BBPR and with Eero Saarinen, on Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale, but even then, he seems to have been able to make sure that his work was conceived as part of the original scheme). Nivola’s control over the commissions, and the scale at which he was able to work, are two features that set his reliefs apart from most of the others being produced at the time.

Nivola made much of the fact that his sculptures were made with the same materials as the buildings they were part of: as he put it, “sculpture ought to be made with the same building material, same technique, and same carpentry as the building in order to be consistent with the scale and design.”(9) In this respect, his use of concrete gave a rationale to his reliefs where they were attached to concrete buildings. Nivola stressed the correspondence between the technique of the sculpture and the technique of the building, which, as he saw it, allowed the distinction between “sculpture” and “architecture” to be dissolved, arriving at an identification of the two where the result was much closer to that of a medieval building. It is worth quoting Nivola’s description of the process, and its benefits:

It is a very straightforward technique, pragmatic and sensible, because the panels are made on the ground, and the materials employed are very simple: just sand and cement. The work is also rather easy and pleasant, because it is done in the open, and this is a very versatile technique that lends itself to covering large areas, at very little cost and labor. Coincidentally, this technique connects to the method of making prefabricated panels in reinforced concrete—a technique much used in construction nowadays. This helps with the problem of artworks, especially in America, which nobody wants to touch because they need insurance, and there is often an over-respect for art. The reliefs are handled simply, by the same means as prefabricated panels, with inserts in the sides for raising them up onto one edge, and then additional inserts at the corners to lift them vertically and fix them to the building. [...]

Hartford, CT, Mutual of Hartford Insurance Co., (Nivola/Sherwood, Mills and Smith). Photo by Robert Stahman. Courtesy of the Nivola Family.

What was necessary and is necessary today is to find a technique for making works of art for architecture that is in line with the current method of construction, with the techniques of construction, in such a way as to avoid these elements being treated in a different manner, but so that they can fit in, as was the case in the past when the sculptor or the painter worked with the same materials as those from which the building was constructed, and the works were incorporated in the church or palace as it was built.

It is in this sense that I have adapted myself most effectively to this activity, because I have taken account of this important factor, that is a technique and a way of working, which doesn’t constitute a rupture, nor is it the result of a specialization, or what is called “custom-made,” but which is part of normal construction. In certain projects, especially that at Yale, this approach is very evident, because this has been perhaps one of the most serious attempts to recapture the spirit of the past, when the artist worked on the building site together with masons and other tradesmen, producing work to be inserted
into their construction.(10)

Nivola saw himself as “normalizing” sculpture, doing away with the barrier between sculpture and architecture, restoring a continuity between artist, architect and builder that had been lost since the middle ages. The panels of the reliefs would become, in the eyes of construction teams, just part of the normal process of building, with nothing special about them. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale (1962) was the project in which he came closest to realizing this ideal—though in this case the sculptural work was not a single relief, but a diffusion of some fifty small or medium sized sculptures across the entire scheme, some of them freestanding, but the majority of them integrated into the random rubble stonework of the walls.

Two other concrete reliefs, those on the Bridgeport Post Building at Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1966 (pp. 106–107), and the Janesville Gazette Building, Janesville, Wisconsin, 1967–70 (pp. 112–113), were Nivola’s last major architectural collaborations. Both were for newspapers, and both made use of blocks of type as one of the motifs, an iconographical element that resonated with the hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptian reliefs. Nivola’s recognition of the Egyptian element was conscious—he had been to Egypt in 1963 as a partner in one of the teams that had put forward proposals for the future of the Abu Simbel temples.(11) The end of Nivola’s architectural collaborations coincided with the termination of concrete reliefs more or less everywhere, except in Eastern Europe, where they survived rather longer. By the early 1970s, they had gone out of fashion almost as quickly as they had come into fashion twenty years or so earlier. In part, their disappearance was a result of the sudden fall from grace of concrete as a construction material that happened around 1970. Concrete’s loss of favor, which occurred for various reasons—in particular its associations with a number of “failed” social projects, and the increasing costliness of executing it to a high standard—was acutely felt by many architects who had invested much of their careers into perfecting its use. One, the Canadian Arthur Erickson, later reflected sadly, “When we lost concrete, I lost my muse.”(12) Another cause for the demise of these sorts of sculptural relief had to do with the rise of post-modernism, which turned to alternative means of architectural signification, making this kind of artistic supplement seem irrelevant and superfluous. They belonged to a very specific historical moment.

Kreisfreistadt, Neubrandenburg, former East Germany. Photo by Sahra Damus.

Stepping back, and looking at the legacy of these concrete reliefs more generally, it would be fair to say that their reception, both in the Eastern Bloc countries, and in the West, was mixed. They were not universally loved. Although some architects were enthusiastic about them, plenty were not, and saw the reliefs as compromising or diminishing the architecture, rather than adding to it. The attitude that good architecture should not need artistic embellishment was a strongly held belief in the modernist tradition, going back to Arts and Crafts days, and especially in the postwar years, much architecture itself became increasingly sculptural in form, underlining the redundancy of artistic supplements. In East Germany, there was criticism of the “artification” [bekunstung] of architecture, and of what was seen as the poor taste of officialdom in the choice of much of the iconography (Fig. 9).(13) Nor did Nivola avoid adverse criticism—the American critic Lewis Mumford, in his review of the Olivetti Showroom, while he appreciated Nivola’s reliefs as art, objected to their incorporation into an architectural interior, to which he believed they added nothing.(14) Ironically, those same reliefs, now in the Science Center at Harvard University, where they were transferred upon the closure of the Olivetti Showroom, have indeed become in their new surroundings purely works of art. What has been lost, and what we now find so difficult to recognize when looking at these concrete reliefs, is that they were neither works of art—as they are now often regarded—nor were they architectural decoration, but rather the survivals of an aspiration towards a novel kind of work that was a synthesis of art and of architecture.