In Boston the job will cost $200 million; the Houston contract will run to $250 million—two of the ripest architectural plums of the year. Both of these projects came from the busy assembly-line drawing boards of one of the most successful and controversial architects in the nation today, Charles Luckman, the onetime boy wonder of the corporate world.
Construction contracts were let last week for Boston’s Prudential Center, which will convert a blighted Back Bay railroad yard to the 52-story New England headquarters of the Prudential Insurance Co., a 1,000-room hotel, a 5,800-seat auditorium, gardens, a skating rink and swimming pool. In Washington this week, NASA will unveil the master plan for its man-in-space research center outside Houston, a complex of 49 buildings, training fields and mock-up lunar landscapes for practice landings. Building begins in May, will finish by late 1964.
Luckman designed them both. Though he is 52 and getting puffy, Chuck Luckman still generates the same showman’s charm that made him president of Pepsodent at 33, president of Lever Brothers at 37, and woefully out of a job at 40 (largely because Lever lost money after Luckman plunged heavily into new products and inventories).
Champions & Critics. In architecture as in big business, Luckman has strong champions and critics. The critics grumble that he is more a businessman than an architect. “He is successful,” says one top Chicago architect coolly, “because he produces anonymous architecture in a prescribed time and at the least cost and fuss to his clients.” Luckman denies only the “anonymous” part of that charge. He insists that “I’m in this business not for security but for satisfaction” Kansas City-born, Luckman was graduated magna cum laude in architecture from the University of Illinois (’31). But Depression pressures pushed him into store-to-store selling. He soon was making news as well as sales. He was credited with discovering Bob Hope for Pepsodent (someone else did). He commissioned the glass-skinned Lever House on Park Avenue, which was worth its weight in free publicity. He discoursed on everything from civil rights to education in the highbrow press, sat on prestigious Government committees, dined with Presidents.
When Luckman’s comet burned low in 1950, he went back to architecture in partnership with a gifted Illinois classmate, Los Angeles Architect William L. Pereira. The two built a substantial list of clients, designed the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus, the U.S. military bases in Spain, the Berlin Hilton hotel and CBS’s Television City in Hollywood. Most of the architecture was frankly Pereira. Luckman wanted to grow bigger and bigger; Pereira wanted to stay small so that he could personally watch over every project from beginning to end. Each got his wish four years ago, when Luckman bought out Pereira, who set off on his own.
Instinct & Experience. Alone, Charles Luckman & Associates has become one of the five biggest architectural firms in the nation. Among his projects: the $6,000,000 Los Angeles Zoo, Stanford University’s $114 million four-mile-long, linear-type atom smasher, the $75 million complex that will be built atop Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station and will include a new Madison Square Garden, a 34-story office building and a 28-story hotel (TIME, Aug. 4). It is difficult to judge his esthetics, because most architects feel there is not yet a sufficient body of work in existence on which to base a fair judgment.
But Architect Luckman can sell to businessmen because he knows from instinct and experience what businessmen want. He is fast: he ground out the NASA space-center plans in 48 days. He emphasizes cost control: since he returned to architecture a decade ago, 92% of his projects have finished at or below planned costs. “No other architect is trained to do this,” says he. Luckman argues that riding herd on costs improves a building because when budgets are exceeded, builders often skimp on the fine finishing details in a frantic effort to save pennies at the last minute.
Luckman is a mass-production operator. He likes to circulate among clients. jams his 65-hour week with personal calls on clients—a habit he developed at Pepsodent (“I knew 35,000 druggists by their first names”). What he regards as the chore work of drawing and engineering, he delegates to subordinates. But, says Luckman,”I personally approve every design that we do.” Competitors cluck that Chuck Luckman could never sit at the same drawing board with a Mies van der Rohe or a Corbusier—or half a hundred top architects for that matter. Luckman airily dismisses such criticism. “Unquestionably,” says he, “other firms work as ably as we do, but they don’t do it in the way we do.
We think that our way will be the way in the next ten years.”
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