TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY ARCHITECTURE
[As Published In The Magazine Pencil Points]
Kenneth Reid [Editor]
Kenneth Reid [Editor]: TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY ARCHITECTURE [As Published In The Magazine Pencil Points]. Stamford, CT and Knoxville, TN: Reinhold Publishing Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1939. Printed saddle-stitched wrappers. 56 pp. Publishers offprint of the November 1939 Pencil Points, requested and distributed by the Informaton Office of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Gray wrappers soiled with a sticker to upper left corner, and a cople of pencil notations to textblock. A good or better copy.
8.75 x 11.75 publication devoted to TVA architecture. Photography by Charles Krutch, photographer and chief of the Graphic Arts Services of the TVA. Cover Design and Typography by Gustav Jensen.
Photographs included have been chosen to emphasize the basically modern design which has resulted from the harmonious collaboration of architect and engineer in this vast government project: engineering control over the 700-mile Tennessee River and its effect upon the valley through which it flows, an area larger than England. The success of the vast project in architectural terms has been achieved through a remarkable unity of concept and purpose among its engineers, architects and designers.
“Distinguished by sober yet imaginative design, the architecture of the TVA is worthy of careful study. It represents a close cooperation of architect and engineer with an understanding of each other's skills on a scale unmatched since the great utilitarian building campaigns of imperial Rome.
"The chief purpose of the TVA is of course the many material benefits which it brings to millions of people, and in this it has succeeded. This exhibition, however, has been planned to show other virtues, less tangible but none the less real. It shows the fine high level of design in the hundreds of structures. It shows that a huge government project can produce fine architecture, a gratifying truth we often forget when looking at much recent work for housing, park service, or, now defense; these structures handsomely combine dignity, logic and beauty - from the minor buildings built around them to the colossal dams themselves. —Museum of Modern Art Press Release, April 28, 1941
Contents
- Design in TVA Structures by Kenneth Reid: 31 pages with 51 photographs, including many gorgeous full-page reproductions.
- Architecture of the TVA by Talbot F. Hamlin: 12 pages with 19 photographs and plans.
- TVA Details: 10 pages of plans and photographs.
"In a few weeks it will be eight years since TVA came into being. In June 1933 we were under feverish pressure to rush into the actual construction of what was to be—and now is—the most extensive series of engineering works ever built by the United States. We realized that we were build ing not for our time alone, but structures that would stand for centuries, a thousand years or more perhaps. The dams must be the finest achievement of modern engineering skill. But what of their esthetic quality, their form? These monuments would reflect for centuries the standard of American culture and the purpose of American life of our time. Should we follow the quite general practice of building the structures, and then add some decorations to make them ‘pretty'? Should we raise up monoliths to set their giant shoulders against the floods of a thousand years, and then embellish their strength with the doo-dads and columns of a civilization now gone for a thousand years?
"Millions of Americans, we told ourselves, will see these structures. They will see in them a kind of token of the virility and vigor of democracy, of its concern for living men and generations yet to come. We wanted these dams to have the honest beauty of a fine tool; for TVA was a tool to do a job for men in a democracy.
"There were practical difficulties to overcome. We had to search for architects who were not in a constant delirium- of nostalgia for the past, men who could interpret the functional strength the engineers would build into these structures; and we had to find engineers willing to collaborate with architects with open and eager minds.
"We like to think of the building of the TVA as an anonymous undertaking. This is not to say that individuals have not touched it with their special talent and genius. Without the great abilities of such men as Chief Engineer Theodore Parker, or Chief Architect Roland Wank, or General Manager Gordon Clapp the result would have been quite dif-ferent and doubtless inferior. But you will search in vain for bronze tablets on any TVA dams, tablets listing the names of engineers or architects, or members of the board of directors for that matter. Nor is this undertaking built to glorify the fame or augment the power of any man. There is one phrase and only one you will find written over the doors of these structures; in large letters is this simple legend: BUILT FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES." — David E. Lilienthal, Director of TVA, 1941
From the TVA website: A middle-aged man with a white-collar job at TVA might find it hard to imagine the products of his work displayed as art—much less hanging in the renowned Museum of Modern Art in New York. But photographer Charles Krutch [1887- 1981] was probably a bit different from most of the people sitting at TVA desks in the agency’s early years. The grandson of German immigrants with aristocratic airs, Krutch documented the transformation of the Valley by TVA in the 1930s and ’40s, and in the process created photographs acclaimed for their artistry.
The Krutches were perhaps the single most talented and eccentric family in Victorian Knoxville, Tennessee. One uncle was a charmingly erratic church organist and impressionist painter, another a concert pianist. Charles’s younger brother, Joseph Wood Krutch, moved to New York and became a famous author and theater critic for The Nation magazine.
Ill as a child and not expected to survive to adulthood, Charles rarely attended school and never finished high school. He remained single through his twenties and thirties, dabbled in photography, and did some work for a local newspaper. He didn’t really need a job, having inherited a good deal of money as a result of his father’s successful business dealings.
Charles Krutch was 47 when he took a job with TVA’s Information Division in 1934, the second year of the agency’s existence. It wasn’t a terribly glamorous occupation, at least not at first. Krutch was a recordkeeper and a staff photographer. His job was to document TVA’s mammoth construction projects as they went up.
Co-workers observed that it might have been his possession of independent means that emboldened him to do things his own way. If he was going to take photographs, he said, he’d take very good ones. He experimented with red filters, and shot many photographs at night to sharpen the contrasts. Some people grumbled about the liberties he took, but no one fired him.
Photographing dams and generators, sheet mills and munitions plants, Krutch played with shapes and shades as few other photographers at federal agencies had ever dared to do. Some of his pictures looked like modernist paintings, dynamic studies in black and white. In a day when photography was barely considered a fine art, Krutch earned a reputation as an artist with a camera.
His photography attracted notice. He’d been at it only three years when, in a 1937 retrospective on the first century of photography, The New York Times featured a Krutch photo of Norris Dam as emblematic of what could be done with a camera.
A photographic exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in May 1941. It showcased 250 photographs of TVA projects, all of them taken by Krutch and his colleague Emil Sienknecht. Among the photographs that big-city museumgoers gawked at were striking Krutch shots of giant generators at Pickwick, a huge crane at Wheeler Dam, and Chickamauga Dam’s spillway at night.
A writer for the photography magazine U.S. Camera was there, and was impressed. “Red filters were used to make the subjects stand out boldly against a dark sky; deep shadows accentuate the hugeness of masses; wide-angle lenses and exaggerated perspective produce extraordinary effects. An illusion of depth, texture, and form is everywhere.”
The New York Times raved, “The beauty of these dams . . . is ageless; it is the honest beauty of a fine tool, shaped by the purpose of its use. This is architecture of lasting worth. Why shouldn’t we insist that other government architecture be equally designed?” You can’t help wondering how much Krutch’s photography contributed to the strength of the impression.
Krutch went on quietly performing his duties at TVA into the 1950s, well past the usual retirement age. Instead of eating lunch with colleagues, the tall, razor-thin photographer would spend his lunch break at the stock brokerage, buying and selling. He and his wife lived in a nice subdivision house on the west side of town, but few of their acquaintances guessed that this mild-mannered TVA employee was a millionaire. He died in October 1981, at the age of 94.
Jaws dropped weeks later when his lawyer read Krutch’s will: he’d left more than a million dollars to the city of Knoxville for the establishment of a downtown park. “A quiet retreat with trees, shrubs, and flowers,” it stipulated, “for the pleasure and health of the public.” The lack of a downtown park was something Knoxvillians had been grumbling about since Krutch’s sickly boyhood.
Today Krutch Park sits one block south of TVA headquarters. Taking up almost half a city block, it contains a small waterfall, a stream flowing into a pond, and lots of trees, shrubs, and flowers. During the spring and summer, it’s green and lush. Krutch’s legacy of beauty lives on in his remarkable photographs, and in the park that bears his name.
I have spent many sunny afternoons in Krutch Park; it is very nice indeed.