Among critics of architecture, the late William H. Jordy never achieved the national celebrity of Lewis Mumford or Ada Louise Huxtable. His output was moderate, and apart from five years writing regularly for The New Criterion (1982–1987) he had no regular editorial perch from which to fashion a reputation. Nor did he ever seek to be a “player” by staking himself to an artist or movement, as Vincent Scully once did with Louis Kahn (a good guess) and Reyner Banham with the New Brutalism (a bad one). Even his authorial voice—circumspect and deliberate, with the miniaturized elegance of a precision watch—was constitutionally incapable of raising a stir. And yet, Jordy had an extraordinary sensitivity to what might be called the aesthetic life of a building, which placed him among the most insightful critics of his generation.

Now fifteen of Jordy’s essays have been gathered by Mardges Bacon, a former student, in Symbolic Essence. This volume opens with a fascinating biographical sketch that sheds light on the peculiar intensity with which Jordy looked at buildings. Born in 1917, he was the son of an accountant from Poughkeepsie. From there he went in 1935 to Bard College, where he studied painting, imbibing the technique of Social Realism as well as its politics (in 1937 he painted an ambitious Rebels Take Madrid). But choosing to study art rather than to make it, he enrolled after graduation at the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, with its roster of distinguished German émigrés.

In 1942 Jordy married Sarah Stoughton Spock, the younger sister of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who encouraged his involvement in Leftist politics. He began his journalistic career at this time, publishing in the key leftist intellectual magazines of the day, including The Nation, The New Republic, Common Sense, and Commonweal. (His first architectural item was a 1943 piece in the Nation, reprinted here, concerning Henry Ford’s efforts to undermine a progressive housing development at his wartime bomber plant, Willow Run.) Although he declared himself a conscientious objector on the outbreak of World War II, once drafted he served willingly, functioning as a divisional historian and combat reporter.

As happened to many liberals of his day, the war made him newly conscious of his American identity. He left the Institute of Fine Arts, where American art was viewed as a bad joke, for Yale University, then pioneering the field of American studies. There he wrote a subtle dissertation on the career of Henry Adams as a historian, concentrating on his role in bringing to America the new German concept of scientific history. Adams would ultimately find that the goal of an absolutely objective history, “subsumed under laws from the experimental sciences,” was unreachable—in large part because his own quest for universal historical laws was not so much a scientific as an aesthetic enterprise, fully in keeping with the languid aestheticism of his life. The dissertation was published as Henry Adams: Scientific Historian in 1952 and was praised by Mumford for the “controlled passion” of its writing. (Jordy evidently admired the phrase—and the idea—and in his review of the Seagram Building he praised “the suppressed passion expended on it.”) Three years later, after teaching at Yale, he joined the faculty of Brown University, remaining there until his retirement.

Jordy summarized Adams’s historical method in words that could easily be applied to his own: “stating, with the least possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent.” Wary of how easily human subjectivity might impinge upon historical objectivity, Jordy cultivated a strenuously dispassionate style, avoiding the grandiloquence or exhibitionism, for example, of Scully, his classmate at Yale. He did not emulate Scully’s narrative approach, in which individual monuments were threaded together to form a grand narrative; his work on Adams inoculated him against anything smacking of epic. Instead he turned to the case study approach—the painstaking and methodical examination of a single building in terms of its construction, materials, plan, composition, and whatever else comprised its intellectual and aesthetic identity. Here he cultivated a distinctive style that consisted of rigorously impersonal analysis delivered in a vividly personal voice.

This voice was already splendidly authoritative in his first major critical essay, a 1958 appraisal of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Because he came to architecture indirectly, after first studying painting and the history of ideas, two fields at its periphery, Jordy had a much more spacious perspective on the subject than critics who viewed it from within. With him, perhaps more than with any other critic, one felt a full personal engagement with the tactile presence of the building, not merely its graphic or conceptual image. Most critics stressed the transparency and lightness of the Seagram Building, those generic properties of the International Style, but he perceptively noted the novel sense of “its visual weight,” and how it recoiled against the “ideal of weightless transparency,” resulting in what was “the first weighty skyscraper to be completely enveloped in its glass window wall.”

Jordy’s claims rested on meticulous forensic analysis, aided by detailed field sketches. (In this respect, his training as a painter stayed with him to the end; Bacon reproduces several pages of these lovely and lucid drawings.) One of his cleverest observations concerned the I-beams Mies mounted in front of his glazed wall. Jordy noticed how the underside of each beam was given a slight lip—placing serifs, as it were, on the I, a refinement of the exposed beams of his earlier Lake Shore Drive apartment houses. These served to mark each beam with a crisp linear shadow, singling them out as discrete elements and further underscoring the physical heft of the building’s projecting lattice of bronze. As with all memorable criticism, Jordy’s comments were able to change permanently the way a viewer perceived the building.

Equally subtle observations about the massing of the building, its color palette, and even its acceptance of the brutal inevitability of corrosion make Jordy’s account a model of eloquent formal analysis. But he augmented his aesthetic investigation whenever possible with historical research. As an academic historian, he felt no qualms about crossing the barrier between critic and subject, and he made a point of speaking to the architects of the buildings he reviewed. He was the first scholar to treat the living figures of modernism with anything like historical rigor, and he interviewed as many as possible, including Gerritt Rietveld, J. J. P. Oud, and William Lescaze. As a consequence, his essays have a strikingly higher fact-to-assertion ratio than is found in most accounts of modernist architecture.

One of the richest essays in this volume is “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer.” While it is generally understood that the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and the Illinois Institute of Technology became citadels of Bauhaus ideology once they came under the control of Gropius and Mies in the late 1930s, Jordy shows how the results were wildly different in the two schools. At Harvard, Gropius stressed collaboration for its own sake, preferring “the competition of different points of view” to a stultifying orthodoxy; he made no effort to impose any sort of stylistic uniformity, and concentrated on process rather than outcome. Far different was the case at IIT, where its smaller size and its technical orientation permitted Mies a much more comprehensive control over the curriculum. This he organized to recreate the sequence of his own architectural education, including intensive drilling in his austere draftsmanship. The result was that IIT promulgated a house style, something impossible at a school like Harvard with a liberal arts tradition.

Jordy’s career unfolded at a time when the theoretical and philosophical premises of modernism were unraveling. The heroic claims made for modern architecture in the 1920s were being gleefully exploded by the early 1960s, and what had once seemed like an absolutely rational method of design and a universally valid set of forms was now beginning to look like a period mannerism, a closed and psychologically inaccessible episode, like the High Victorian. Jordy, typically, saw that there was nearly as much polemical hysteria in the attacks on modernism as there was in its manifesto-fanned rise. In the title essay of this volume, “The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture,” Jordy attempted to take the measure of the critical attacks and to see what, if anything, was left of the modernist edifice. Was it merely a period style, brought into being by the violent convergence of sociological and technological pressures in the 1920s, and now superseded by subsequent events? Or had something fundamental happened that continued to shape the culture of architecture? In other words, “did a momentous reorientation occur in architecture in the Twenties, or did it not?”

Jordy’s answer was that modernist buildings were never literally objective, unlike the airships and streamlined hulls that they imitated. If one were to judge modernist buildings solely on functional terms, one would condemn the bronze I-beams on the face of the Seagram Building, which mimicked the concealed structure beneath, or Le Corbusier’s use of nautical motifs on the Villa Savoye. The salient I-beams and crisp nautical railing were presentations of “flat fact as symbol”; their purported objectivity was in fact a “symbolic objectivity, a mythic factuality omnipresent in modern architecture.”

Jordy’s full argument, too complex to do full justice to here, is perhaps the only one in this book that seems dated. Already the impulse to defend the intrinsic objectivity of modernism—if not on architectural, then on philosophical grounds—was rather quaint. But it is poignantly expressive of Jordy’s intellectual probity that he would attempt, at this late date, an account of early modernism on a factual basis, free of polemical tendentiousness. It is not the most revealing essay here (that would be a previously unpublished meditation on the meaning of the Tennessee Valley Authority), but it shows Jordy struggling to define for himself the criteria by which he proposed to judge modernism, and to stake out a critical basis beyond the subjective world of taste and personal preference.

Jordy died in 1997, having relinquished criticism six years earlier to finish his Buildings of Rhode Island in the Buildings of the United States series (for which I serve as associate editor). It is a pity he was not able to turn his ordered mind to the tangled architectural landscape of Deconstruction, a movement that has not yet found its scientific historian. In compensation, however, we have this subdued and elegant volume, bearing the finest author’s photograph I know: Jordy striding jauntily up the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum as if it were a mighty gangplank, and the great voyage was about to begin.

Michael J. Lewis is a professor in the art department at Williams College.