Urban's Masterpiece on Twelfth Street

ROBERT REED COLE

Joseph Urban, born in Vienna in 1872, was a creative partici¬
pant in the an revival that flourished in the glittering capital of
the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the century. By the time he
settled in the United States in 1911, he had already achieved more
than most artists do in a lifetime. Architecture was his training and
first love, but he was also adept at stage and interior design and book
illustration.

Urban's career in America lasted until his death in 193 3 and was
as diverse as it had been in Europe. Prolific as he was in many fields,
he is best remembered today for his settings for the Metropolitan
Opera and for Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies. To accumulate enough cap¬
ital to open his own architectural studio in New York, he worked
for five years beginning in 1920 for William Randolph Hearst's
Cosmopolitan Films, creating lavish backgrounds for Hearst's mis¬
tress and protegee, Marion Davies.

Two of the three buildings that Urban designed in New York City
are still standing. For Hearst he created the International News
Service Building on Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue. The
publisher loved to talk about his newspaper and magazine
"empire," so Urban, in a spirit of gentle fun, provided him with a
suitably mock imperial headquarters. It is doubtful that the dour
and humorless "emperor" ever got the joke.

The other surviving structure is, fortunately, Urban's master¬
piece: the New School on West Twelfth Street, which opened on
New Year's Day in 1930. Having been forced out of the space it had
rented since the school was founded in 1918 by such distinguished
scholars as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, it was decided in
1928 that the school should have its own building.

The school's president and co-founder, Alvin Johnson, had two
architects in mind for the project: Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph
Urban. Wright's career was in a temporary eclipse at the time, and
he was financially desperate. Urban loaned the man who is now
 

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