SN \ Sh . SSS x SN SH WORM OMAN \\ SN SA eter fet, \ \ . SS A \ WADSWORTH “a ; BOSTON - ARCHITECTS SS a ws ~ WADSWORTH, BOSTON & TUTTLE ARCHITECTS 57 EXCHANGE ST. PORTLAND, MAINE ee : bs 3 Be © ; = — Z ae ERIC AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE BY FISKE KIMBALL ILLUSTRATED Hill INDIANAPOLIS and NEW YORK THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS | Copyniaxr, 1928 By Tue Bosss-Merrux Company Printed in the United Site 2 ‘ : | zy of “BROOKLYN, N. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Oe Ee ie) 18 ME ete ISEGINNINGS . . . wlll LT II Tse Arrerc iow or THE Mippue Acrs . 27 III From Jacospean To Grorcian. .. . 385 IV Tue Heypay or THE Encuisu Cotonites. 41 V Provinctat Types oF THE SEABOARD. . 57 VI SPANISH AND FreENcH Outposts. . . 63 VII First Works UNDER THE ReEpusrtic . . 69 VIII Tue Geeex Revivan. .... . 95 IX Romanticism AND THE GoTHIc . . . Ill ™ 4 Conrousion or Toneurs . . . . 119 XI THe Srace or Mopernism: New MarTeriAts AND New Trrpses.... 1385 XII Waar Is ArcnitectureE? THr Pours or Mopernism: FuncTion AnD Form. . 147 XIII Tue Trivumpen or Crassican Form . . 171 may Counter-Currents . . . . . . 191 Meee PeeOPENSENT . . « +. « » « + 208 DMPRIANHATTAN 5 . «¢ + «© 0). » al ee ie she ae ee eal a wae Ret fe BBL URRY moo OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE “English wigwams’—types of the first shelters in New England . se tee A log house of the Swedes—Delaware County Pennsylvania An early Anglican church—St. Luke’s, Isle of — Wight County, Virginia . ; An early evangelical chapel Muhlenberg s church at Trappe, Pennsylvania The home of a New England divine—the Parson Capen house at Topsfield, Massachusetts . The Anglican communion—Saint Paul’s ia a New York The old State House in Philadelphia —Indepen dence Hall : A Virginia gentleman’s seat—-Westover on the James The colonial style in flower—the Brewton portico Charleston The colonial style in flower—the Great Chamber at Mount Pleasant A New England farmhouse—the Barker + howe, Pembroke, Massachusetts , A Dutch farmhouse—the sida Diecast New Lots, Long Island : A Pennsylvania eae Sister house at Ephrata 20 21 28 29 36 37 46 ANG 50 51 58 59 60 LIST OF ILLUSTRATION S—Continued FACING PAGE A Pennsylvania barn—Bucks County . 61 The Spaniards in Texas—Mission San José, San Antonio 64 The Spaniards in California—Mission Santa Barbara 65 On a Louisiana plantenon yy ae on the Mis- sissippl ; 72 The first building of the Republio—the Virgin Capitol, Jefferson’s model 73 The federal Capitol—Thornton’s ae 82 France in America—the New York City Hall 83 Rome in America—the University of Virginia 86 An Adam interior—the oval wey at Lemon Hull, Philadelphia 87 An Adam house in New England—the Lyman house at Waltham, Massachusetts . 90 A house of the eet the home of Jefferson . OL The beginnings of the Greek revival—the Bank of Pennsylvania, Latrobe’s design . 96 The triumph of Greek revival—the Bank of the United States, Philadelphia . 97 The Greek Column—the ibrencs Monument in Baltimore . . 100 The Greek House—Andalusia on the Delaware . 101 The early Gothic revival—the Eastern Peniten- tiary, Philadelphia nO Gilded reminiscences—Biltmore : Ses 2. Later Gothic—the Chapel at West Point . . 156 ee LIST OF ILLUSTRATION S—Concluded FACING PAGE The steel frame—the poe viegatiia Saint Louis . The return to classical form—the Villard pega New York The music of surface—the Boston Public Library The triumph of classical form—the Court of Honor, Chicago . The music of space—the ca Mas ole room, New York . The poles of modernism: the ae padae tial) Building, Buffalo; Apartments for the Century Holding Company, New York . Old material and new form—the Wainwright tomb, St. Louis New use and new form—the Larkin Factory, Buffalo New material and new Seen ee Oak Park The cathedral of Mammon—Woolworth Buildings New York The arrow—Bush tower, New York . Masses—Hotel Shelton, New York Mass and line—the American Radiator ee New York : Mass and line—the New York cape siete Build- ing, New York : Tops ses ae The grotesque—Times Square at night The magic mountain—Lower Manhattan from the Bay The canyon—Lower Broadway . 157 . 164 165 ma . 183 . 186 . 222 . 223 (¢ 5 ~ FOREWORD AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE FOREWORD AMONG a people with the vast material task of conquering the wilderness of a continent, mastering the riches of its soil, its forests, its waters and mountains, artistic expression takes chiefly the form of building, of architecture. It is in architecture, of all the arts, that America has said best what it has had to say. It is in architecture that America, grown to imperial might, has said something new and vital in art. Its history has sometimes been represented as a degeneration. Under Ruskin’s system of moral values, falsely imported into the field of art, the Colonial day has been glorified as a golden age of honest traditional craftsmanship, the modern vilified as false and base. We can not take this view. To us the Colonial style, with [13] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE all its provincial charm, is still in leading strings. Only with the founding of the Republic does a creative spirit appear, a new sense of form. Then, as a new civilization takes shape, amid the hum of harvester and factory, a new material, steel, leaps from the earth. Its towers, rising in sunshine and storm, glowing in the night, em- body the aspiration of a new world. [14] hope _ THE BEGINNINGS oo CHAPTER I THE BEGINNINGS Into the wilderness of virgin forest came, in the seventeenth century, English, Swedes and Dutch. A few were gentlefolk, used to the houses of brick and stone and framed timber then confined at home to their own class. The majority were yeomen, tenants, or farm laborers, coming from the “frail houses” of wattle, clay, sod and thatch, in which the rural population of Europe then had its miserable shelter. There was little in their past existence for them to miss. Glass windows and brick chimneys were luxuries to which they were not accustomed. To all but the Swedes an abundance of timber was a nov- elty. To the men of every country there came for the first time the boon of free land for all. Never had there been such a leveler. In their first winter at Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop had to release his servants, who took up their own tracts. Proprietaries and grants there [17] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE might be, but, with land in inexhaustible supply, these would not keep men from streaming to the frontier of ownership. From that day nearly to our own, when the public domain approaches exhaustion, this freedom of the land is the key to American development. Democracy with its far-reaching effects was rooted in the soil, and for over two hundred years only the enslavement of another race could keep men in bondage. Colonists, be they Greeks at the Pillars of Hercules, Romans in the forests of the Rhine, or Europeans on the opposite fringe of the Atlantic; strive first to make their new home like the old. To create in a new continent a new civilization and a new art is farthest from their thoughts. All their effort is to secure, and then to hold against all the odds of difference and of distance, what they knew in the mother country at the time they left. Changes are forced on them by the new environment, to be sure, but they come against all the resistance of colonial conservatism. New England, New Nether- lands, New France and New Spain were, so long as they remained colonies, as near like their mothers as filial imitation could make them. [18] THE BEGINNINGS Thus at first the settlers built their houses like those they had known. ‘The common folk at Jamestown and Plymouth made shelters with slanting poles covered with brush, reeds and earth, perhaps over a low wall of stakes and wattle plastered with clay. These were the “English wigwams” of early chroniclers—by no means like those of the Indians, as some have thought. Sometimes, as in the church at Ply- mouth and later in the houses of English settlers in East Jersey, sawn planks were driven into the ground to make what were called palisaded houses. In Connecticut and in Philadelphia “caves” or “cellars” were made by digging into the banks, walling and roofing with sods and brush. The log house, of horizontal logs notched to- gether at the corners and chinked with clay, which has been ignorantly assumed to have been borrowed from the aborigines by the first set- tlers, was unknown either to the Indians or to the early English colonists. It seems to have been brought in from the Continent by the Swedes of the Delaware, the first settlers from northern Europe, where it was known also by the Swiss [19] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE and Germans who followed. It first commended itself to the English through its superior strength for forts and prisons. Before the end of the century “garrisons” and blockhouses of squared logs dotted the New England rivers and coasts. Prisoners could not be held in the frail shelters, and in Georgia, at first, “log house” definitely meant a jail. Obviously suited to the densely forested new country, where trees must be felled to clear the land for tillage, the log house grad- ually became the typical home of the later fron- tiersman. aes Long before this, and soon after the first set- tlement, the governors, the ministers and the men of prominence had begun to build houses of — frame, of brick and of stone, and these materials were used also for the churches. The typical better house of the rural districts and towns in England and central Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century was what we now call the half-timbered house. It had a heavy hewn frame of oak, jointed and pinned, and filled in with “cat-and-clay” (rolls of clay and straw), with sun-dried brick, or with wattle, plastered with clay and washed with lime. Such houses were [20] pur]suy AMON UTI sia}pays say oy} Jo sodvy, SIVMOIA\ HSIIDN sald finssauug avq ‘shvjdojoygd vawwy fo scjp uolypQ ayz {0 auo ,,fsuD}L.INgT eY][,, WOLT eruvayAsuuag ‘AyUNOD IRMPTIG—SICIMG AHL JO aAsAOfY DOT V UOSUYOL SNPUDUWP PUD 40040TT *O Ae we nat oe - OR nee 2 o Alga e THE BEGINNINGS built for Endecott and Winthrop at Salem and Charlestown. Some built a century later by the Germans still survive in central Pennsylvania. Very soon, however, it was found that the severer climate of America demanded some exterior covering. The English supplied this by hanging the house with weather-boards, not uncommon then in Kent, where they survive in houses which clearly show the origin of the typical American form. The filling of the frame behind by brick or plaster long survived, although it was gradu- ally disused, and the timber house came to have the open frame we know to-day. Although thatched roofs survived until the end of the century, and slate and tile came into use, the characteristic roof covering was shingle. Far from being regarded in England as inferior, it was there so costly as to be restricted to church steeples where weight was a consideration. On the American coast cedar was everywhere, and shingle replaced thatch two centuries before the use of thatch was generally abandoned abroad. By 1650 the ordinary artisan and farmer in the older colonies had a small house of frame, a story and a half in height, one room on each [21] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE floor—superior perhaps to what he could have hoped for in the Old World. ‘That wooden shutters still often served in place of glass case- ments, and that many chimneys remained of catted clay, was only what was usual on the same social level in Europe. The exhaustion of the forests in England dur- ing the later seventeenth century led to the abandonment of frame construction there, and the increasing use of brick and stone by the com- mon man, whose position had been greatly im- proved during the Civil Wars. In America wood remained plentiful. It was made cheaper still by sawmills, scarcely known in England, intro- duced from the Continent. Even until to-day, after three centuries of wanton cutting, wood has remained at an advantage in cost over brick or stone. ‘The dampness of masonry houses, in a climate of extremes, also caused prejudice against them. Nevertheless houses and churches of brick or stone were built from an early time in those colonies where the materials were readily available. In Pennsylvania—founded near the end of the century—they formed the majority. The crucial material for building in stone was [22] THE BEGINNINGS lime. It was lack of limestone near Tidewater that hampered the New England and Virginia colonists from building much in brick. Governor Winthrop tried building a stone house at Med- ford with clay mortar, but the rain washed it quickly to the ground. Oyster shells furnished the only resource, and when the Indian beds of these neared exhaustion the authorities had to forbid the use of oysters for anything but food and bait. Roger Williams hed limestone at Providence Plantation and started a flourishing trade, while his people built houses exceptional for their vast chimneys of stone, filling the whole end of the house. On the Schuylkill there was abundance of lime, and the colonists, familiar with London as rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, used brick and the fine ledge stone which was so plentiful and so easily split. The legend of brick brought from England, or from Holland, is repeated of almost every fine old brick building in the colonies. The records show this to be a myth, except for a few cases in New Netherlands. Brickmaking is one of the simplest of arts. Brickmakers came with the _ first settlers. Clay and wood to burn it were [23] seen the soil of the Tidewater would importing brick was bringing coals to 2 ra ¢ , yt % : SE he Hh Sat tee z vie "sh [24] F age ts . 4 AGES ~~ CHAPTER II THE AFTERGLOW OF THE MIDDLE AGES In THE first buildings of frame and of masonry, indeed in all those constructed down to ‘the end of the seventeenth century, we see a survival of the art of the Middle Ages. Steep roofs, leaded casements, clustered chimney-stacks and exposed construction, the most striking features of these buildings, all had come down from the Gothic. They had persisted in the great noble houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and were a greater part of their effect than the new Italian adornments of the classic orders. In the churches and the small houses of England, the Italian influence had not yet been felt at all when the first colonists set sail. In rural England and in Germany the peasant and ordinary dweller of the rural town built on for generations after this in the spirit of the Middle Ages. It is not surprising that in America, on the extreme outskirt of European civilization, [27] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE the Renaissance should have been long in making — itself felt. Even for the rich, even for the gentle- men who came, the decent satisfaction of needs was long all that could be secured. Under these conditions the Gothic stock of north Huropean art flourished on here for a long time before receiving the grafts from the south. The churches were the first fruits of common effort, whether in the Biblical communities of New England where town and parish were one, - or among the dispersed plantation parishes of Virginia. In both,the Gothic forms were used, but the type of edifice for the established Church of England differed markedly from that of the more extreme ‘Protestant cults, in accordance with their models in the Old World. The Anglican church-building of Virginia was — merely a rural English parish church of its time, built across the water. The earliest, still sur-— viving in part, was the one at Jamestown. A large square tower stood before a buttressed _ nave. In Saint Luke’s Church, built on the same model near by in Isle of Wight, we see the details _ of the upbuilding: a steep roof with stepped gable and pointed Gothic windows divided by [28] Photograph by H. P. Cook AN CHURCH St. Luke's, Isle of Wight County, V 1 AN Earty ANGLI¢ irginia euvapAsuuag ‘addeay, ye younyD ss1oquatynyy IddVHO IVOITAONVAY ATIVE NY wnasnyy niwpajyisuuag ayz fo fisaqsnop AFTERGLOW OF MIDDLE AGES tracery of brick. Only in the square blocks at the corners of the tower, and in the triangle above the door—faint suggestion of the temple front—do we find the first hints of classic in- fluence. Trinity Church, New York, built within the eighteenth century and burned in the Revolution, was still Gothic in its form, as were the stone churches of the Dutch in New Jersey, and the Welsh chapel of Saint David’s at Rad- nor in Pennsylvania. The New England meeting-house was a dis- senting chapel of the kind which came into being at the very beginnings of Protestantism, with Luther. English examples are little known, but they exist, and show all essentials of the scheme: a broad hall with galleries on three sides, the high pulpit on the fourth long wall opposite the entrance porch. The earliest which survives in the Colonies, the “Old Ship” at Hingham, still shows amid modern gimcracks the curved braces which gave it its name. No unspoiled church interior of this early character survives in New England, but one in which it persisted long after 1700 may be seen in Muhlenberg’s church at Trappe in Pennsylvania, the cradle of the Amer- [29] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE ican Lutheran communion. Here one may still _ find the box-pews, the rough tiers of gallery benches, the posts and rails of a character which in England would be called Jacobean. Accord- ing to the Lutheran ritual the sanctuary is here at one end of the church, with the altar in the center, the high pulpit at one side. The timber houses of the seventeenth century survive in numbers in New England. Originally they were but a single room in depth, one or two rooms long, at most two stories and a half in height. Their great oak and pine frames are elaborately jointed, and richly beveled and molded to form also the chief decorative element. In the more ambitious houses, as in the medieval houses of Europe, the upper story overhung the lower, with moldings or pendants hewn on the frame. Banks of hinged casements with small square or diamond-shaped leaded panes pierced — the broad surfaces of weather-boards. Exact- ness of symmetry was little regarded: the spac- ing followed the unequal size of rooms behind, after the frank practise of the Middle Ages. In- © side, the cavernous fireplace, spanned by a great beam, was the focus of family life. The parti- [30] AFTERGLOW OF MIDDLE AGES tions and sometimes also the outer walls of the rooms were wainscoted with broad boards molded at the joints. In the brick houses the most striking features were the tall chimney-stacks which rose at the gable-ends, sometimes with a cluster of separate flues and with the gable itself stepped and curved, as in the Jacobean houses of England. Bacon’s Castle in Virginia now gives the best idea of the type, which was illustrated also in the great house of Peter Sergeant in Boston (later the Province House), and at Medway and Mid- dleton in Carolina. The addition of a porch in front and stairs at the rear might make the house in the form of a cross, as at Bacon’s Castle; or it might have its plan in the shape of H or E, sur- viving from the time of Elizabeth, as at Fair- field, Virginia, and the first City Hall in New York. Long afterward indeed, the type per- sisted in Tuckahoe, home of the Randolphs, in Stratford, home of the Lees, and in Browne’s Folly at Beverly, Massachusetts. At the Mul- berry in Carolina there were even four corner towers. [31] a Se ee a ee . Se Fe ike 7, ; < _— : es < gS . oe) i o) H Zz fe = On the borders of Chesapeake Bay, Thornton gave admirable models of the Adam style in Homewood, near Baltimore, in the Octagon at — Washington, in Tudor Place at Georgetown. Even in Virginia, the stronghold of the monumental classic, the delicate Adam treat-— ment made the effect of the lovely Barton Myers house in Norfolk. At Charleston the chimney- pieces showed the same decorative motives as those of distant Salem and Portland. The builders did not always use ornaments — cast from London molds. Robert Wellford, who claimed to be the first American maker of com- position ornament, not only imitated these, but put on the market patriotic subjects such as the Battle of Lake Erie and the eagle mourning over the tomb of departed heroes. Local house- joiners even developed their own means of sug- gesting the Adam effects by simple use of their ordinary tools. Rosettes and garlands were made with flutings and nicks of the gouge, or with auger holes of varied sizes. These in- genious adaptations to tool and material are among the most charming of minor American architectural devices. [90] s}josnyorsseyy ‘WIVYy[R A, Jv asnNoPyT UuvULA’T ou, GNVIONG MAN NI asnopxY Wvay NY unuhy inyjitp fo fisazanop Photograph by Roger Millen A Howse or rue PrepMont Monticello, the home of Jefferson FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC Meanwhile, however, the example of Jefferson was giving a direct impulse to more rigorous and severe classical treatment in house building. Retired from Washington’s administration, he undertook the remodeling of Monticello in a more Roman style. The attics were pulled down to give an effect of a single story as in Roman houses and their French adaptations; a Roman dome was added over the salon as in the Hotel de Salm. In the great houses of his friends in the Piedmont, at Montpelier, Edgehill, Farm- ington, Ampthill, Barboursville and Bremo, he used the massive square white portico with tell- ing effect against the walls of brick. When he became President he ordained for the White House the great circular portico of the river front, the long colonnades of the offices at either side. In the University of Virginia, at the end of his career, he finally achieved his prophetic early ambition to fit the whole house within the rectangular mass of the temple, an extreme of classical ardor which had no parallel abroad. The students spread his example all up and down the South. [91] 2% ie VIiIl THE GREEK REVIVAL CHAPTER VIII THE GREEK REVIVAL Harp on the heels of the first adoption of Roman forms came the Greek. The leader here was a newcomer, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a professional of thorough training who had learned his Greek details in England. He found himself in an atmosphere of classical enthusiasm greater than that of England itself—of allusions from Plutarch to Brutus and to Cincinnatus, with whom the Revolutionary patriots had been identified. He supplied the knowledge, but the stimulus to bodily imitation of ancient buildings came from the initiative of Jefferson and the fervor of clients and laymen. Latrobe’s opportunity came at the turn of the century, with the building of the Bank of Penn- sylvania—destroyed, alas, long ago. It was all of marble. The general form was rectangular, with porticoes at each front of six graceful Ionic columns, their capitals modeled on those of the [95] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Erechtheum. In the center was the circular banking-hall, domed in masonry on the pattern of the Pantheon. Beaujour, the French major, “a man of great talents . . . long in Greece and Egypt . . . a perfect judge of the fine arts,’ summed up its qualities in the phrase, “§i beau, et si simple.” ) On the exterior, at the side, there are many little departures from the antique model which show that the architect was not altogether happy in the straight-jacket of the temple form. La- — trobe himself testified, after the death of the bank’s president, Samuel M. Fox, that the “ox. istence and taste” of the building were due to” him. Thornton, Latrobe’s great antagonist, — ; likewise bore witness to this by putting satiri- cally this remark into his mouth: “The Bank of Pennsylvania I know has been much admired, but it would have been much handsomer if — Joseph Fox and the late John Blakely, Esqrs. a directors, had not confined me to a copy of the Parthenon at Athens.” 'Thus the authorities of the bank, who owed much to Latrobe’s skill, ap- — s pear to have been ultimately responsible for the essentially American literalness of its classicism. [96] usISop s ‘6 oqo 178” I ‘BIUR A[ASuudg Jo UL 2 Pa ——- Wy ATAGY Mal a) AILL 40 SONINNIDGEG dH, fijovogy 19040I81TT punjhanyg ayz fo fisaqimog erydyopepyag ‘Seq%}S pou ey} FO Yurg UL IVAIAGY MATL) AELL £6) Hawa, aH, muvapisuuag fo fizaoogy )voo sry 9U} fo fisajmop THE GREEK REVIVAL Jefferson, who had become President in 1801, was quick to see Latrobe’s ability and to give him official encouragement as he had the other men of high training. He created the post of Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States and placed Latrobe in charge both at the Capitol and at the White House. The old Hall of Representatives, burned by the British, was a triumph of their collaboration. The House and Senate Chambers as Latrobe rebuilt them after the War of 1812 were Greek hemicycles of great dignity. By his personal stamina, and by the support of Jefferson, Latrobe was able to sur- vive the onslaughts of Thornton, by which his predecessors, Hallet and Hadfield, had been borne under, and to establish the first profes- sional office of an architect in the United States, with a wide practise. His pupils Robert Mills and William Strickland carried on his tradition, which dominated American architecture to the middle of the nineteenth century. Already by its second decade Greek enthusi- | asm was at a high pitch. Nicholas Biddle, who in his precocious youth had selected the casts from the Musée Napoleon for the Pennsylvania [97] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Academy of the Fine Arts, and had undertaken the journey to Greece, was the arbiter of taste. For his magazine, the Port-Folio, George Tucker, one of Jefferson’s protégés, wrote urg- ing a veritable revival of Greek architecture. When the second Bank of the United States undertook its new banking house in Philadelphia the advertisement for plans stated that “the Directors are desirous of exhibiting a chaste imitation of Grecian architecture, in its simplest form.” Latrobe, in his design, took the final step of reproducing the Parthenon, with two fronts of eight Greek Dorie columns. Strickland and others also gave Greek designs, and it was to Strickland that the execution, closely follow- ing Latrobe’s plans, ultimately fell after his master’s departure and death. In the day of its building the Bank attracted an attention which was international. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar wrote in 1825: “It is the most beautiful building I have yet seen in the United States.” The highest praise is that of a cor- respondent of the London Morning Chronicle, in the ’thirties, who writes that the building “ex- cells in elegance and equals in utility, the edifice, [98] THE GREEK REVIVAL not only of the Bank of England, but of any banking house in the world.” These estimates were dependent on the uni- versal success of the Greek revival, which else- where ultimately reached the same goal. In Great Britain the form of the Parthenon had been adopted for the National Monument at Edinburgh. In Germany it had been embodied in the Walhalla at Regensburg. These, how- ever, were monuments simply. It scarcely oc- curred to architects abroad to follow the great Athenian model in a building devoted to prac- tical uses. The Bank of the United States not only anticipates the foreign versions of the Parthenon by a decade but represents an ex- treme of classicism unparalleled abroad. The form of the temple was established as a single unconditional ideal for all classes of buildings. For the Connecticut capitol at New Haven, Ithiel Town built a model of the Theseum; for the Kentucky capitol at Frankfort it was an Ionic temple which was preferred. New York, too, had to have its Parthenon, the old Custom House, now the Sub-Treasury, built by Town and Alexander Jackson Davis. The banks of [99] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Wall Street of the ’thirties might well suggest the row of treasuries at Olympia. For Girard College in Philadelphia, Biddle overrode the op- position of the architect, Thomas U. Walter, to force the adoption of the temple form executed with a vast Greek Corinthian order. Where the full scheme of the temple was not adopted at least there was a great colonnade, as in Mills’ facade of the Treasury in Washington, Town’s, in the Merchants’ Exchange in New a York, and in Walter’s wings of the national Capitol. Strickland carried a circular peristyle about the front of the Exchange in Philadelphia, and placed the Monument of Lysicrates, as a convenient cupola, on top. | The commemorative monuments also took their forms from antiquity. In the competition for the Washington Monument in Baltimore, Ramée proposed a triumphal arch, Mills, a vast Greek column. Greece and the column carried off the palm. The design of the monument, powerful and utterly simple, anticipates those of the Wellington monuments in London and Dublin, and has set the example for many others. — For the monument at Bunker Hill an obelisk [100] Photograph by James F. Hughes THe Greek CoLuMN / The Washington Monument in Baltimore VIVMETIG. 3} WO eISNTepuy asooy] Wsaug AH, a0nn9M “gT Any fq ydvsbo0yg pescerne cy napa Nas snag ee THE GREEK REVIVAL was preferred, and this was the type with which Mills won the competition for the Washington Monument in the national capital, completed only after the Civil War. In its day it was the tallest of man-made structures. Before its com- pletion all extraneous appendages had been eliminated. The character of classic architec- ture and the character of Washington are well matched in its noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. The first church to show the classic inspiration was Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore for the diocese of the United States, begun after the opening of the century. Here a Roman scheme was adopted, with simple granite walls, a low masonry dome over the crossing, a great portico at the west. The interior had a new richness in composition of interior space, a new majesty. Even to-day, a century after its build- ing, the Cathedral remains the finest classical church in the country. For Saint John’s, the Episcopal church in Washington, Latrobe chose the scheme of the Greek cross with equal arms, now disguised by later additions. To his pupil Mills, fell the task [101] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE of adapting the classic forms to the requirements of the newer evangelical sects. For the audito- rium which their emphasis on the sermon re- quired he used a great domed rotunda, circular or octagonal. Of all his churches of this type there remains only the Monumental Church in Rich- mond, in which he used the Egyptian details first popularized by Napoleon’s eastern campaign. Considerations of use were ultimately thrust aside in the church, also, by visions of the temple. Jefferson built one, Roman in suggestion, for Christ Church in Charlottesville. For the French chapel in New York, Davis followed the Tonic temple on the Illissus. In St. Paul's Church in Boston and in many others the simple severity of the temple was also preferred, the Christian purpose revealed only by the Cross. The dwelling was the last to yield to the ruling Greek mania, but yield it did, and the triumph of the classic was universal. Critics who have felt that the passing of the Colonial marked the end of healthy development of traditional art as an outgrowth of contemporary culture, and that the classic revival was an exotic with no firm root in American civilization forget that the men of [102] THE GREEK REVIVAL the ’twenties and ’thirties had a consciousness of solidarity with ancient Greece which reached every department of life. Their enthusiasm was fanned into flame by the Greek war of independence. There was even the demand for military intervention. A Congressman from western New York declared he could furnish, from his sparsely settled region, “five hundred men, six feet high, with sinewy arms and case- hardened constitutions, bold spirits and daring adventurers, who would march on a bushel of corn and a gallon of whisky per man from the extreme part of the world to Constantinople.” Jefferson’s Roman temples for his professors, realizing his dream of a generation before, had been the first of the temple houses. Hadfield translated one into Greek at Arlington, the home of Washington’s adopted son, whose daughter was later to bring it to her husband, the com- mander of the Confederate armies, Robert E. Lee. Hadfield used a front of six Doric columns of enormous massiveness, following those of the great temple at Paestum. Disproportionate as it seems from near at hand, no other house than Arlington could carry so well across the [103] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Potomac, no other so well hold its own at the other end of a composition with the Capitol. The extreme step in the imitation of the temple, the placing of columns all about instead of merely in front, was taken by Biddle in en- larging his house, Andalusia, on the Delaware in 1834. He followed the Theseum at Athens which he had seen and admired in his youth. It remained only to model a house on the Par- thenon, with its front of eight columns instead of six. This was done by James Coles Bruce at his Virginia plantation, Berry Hill. Bruce had stayed in Philadelphia just before inheriting the estate, and was influenced by Andalusia in his choice of atype. On either side of its great lawn are the office and schoolhouse, each likewise in the form of a Greek Doric temple. Nowhere else, perhaps, is the ante-bellum plantation to be found in equal magnificence. South and North, East and West, such ex- amples were followed in houses large and small. Whenever towns and regions prospered in the thirties and forties, the white porticoes were to be found, fronting or surrounding the houses. In the academic shades of Cambridge, of Athens [104] * as all ee ee (nal aan el ey THE GREEK REVIVAL in Georgia—significant by its very name—in the whaling ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, in the blue grass of Kentucky, they flourished alike. In New York, Colonnade Row on Lafayette Street sheltered Fenimore Cooper, Philip Hone, and Washington Irving. Along the Gulf it was particularly common to have the columns surrounding the house, with balconies between, suitable to the climate. In the backwoods states beyond the Alleghe- nies and the Ohio the imitation of the temple was even more universal than on the seaboard. When the wave of Eastern emigration of the thirties swept out along the newly opened Erie Canal and across the lakes it brought with it the classic ideal. The names of towns—Rome and Syracuse and Troy in western New York; Ypsi- lanti and Byron, Ionia and Scio in Michigan— recall classic sites, or personalities and places in the Greek struggle for freedom. Many a little old township in the Northwest has no house which does not conform to the ruling taste, yet such were the possible variations that no two are alike. Square piers might be substituted for the round columns, Greek moldings suggested with [105] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE astonishing success by the simplifications of the carpenter. With forms so thoroughly established, owners were able to proceed with no other assistance than that of the builders. The few professional architects of the time, mostly in the eastern centers, generally refused to abdicate their creative liberty to the temple scheme in dwelling- houses, so that it represents a genuinely popular preference of laymen and amateurs. Along with the rectangular temple, the passion for unity of form brought the centralized scheme,—square, octagonal or circular,—de- scendant of the villa rotonda. Latrobe employed this for his Center House of the Philadelphia Water Works, a dome sheltering the tank. Jef- ferson, who had three times proposed Palladio’s © model for others without success, finally built for his own retreat at Poplar Forest a house which was a perfect octagon. Years later Orson Squire Fowler built another on the Hudson, and by his publications spread the idea widely. In the fifties octagonal houses were scattered every- where. Even the ultimate step of building the house in the form of a circle—long imagined by [106] : Fig eee iy Sia ean wee Fe THE GREEK REVIVAL enthusiasts—was finally taken. The victory of the formal ideal was complete. Jefferson’s dream thus came true—to estab- lish the classic as a national style. While it had triumphed in every country, in the older nations of Europe, with firmly established traditions, its success had been tempered by conservatism and common sense. Only on the outskirts of European civilization, in Scotland, in Russia, in America was enthusiasm sophomoric enough to carry through the full classic program. Only in America was it pushed to its extreme conse- quences. The attempt can not be judged merely from our present standpoint. In 1800 it was not banal, but original, to copy the Greeks. What- ever we think of the work of the revivalists, we must recognize that they endowed America with an architectural tradition unsurpassed in dignity and monumental quality. Whether we like it or not we must recognize it as one of the distinctive American contributions to style. It furnished the basis for the ingrained love of the simple, austere, refined and chastened in architecture which underlies the spirit of our creative work to-day. [107] rs tf CHAPTER IX ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC LikE all artistic creations, the classic edifice, in the moment of its highest splendor, was being undermined by the work of a new generation. The classicists were followed by the romantics. Although romanticism with its glorification of the individual was rooted in the very essence of American democracy, the first stimulus came from abroad, especially from England, where the romantic movement had long been gathering strength. ‘The modern appreciation of land- scape had begun early in the eighteenth century. Kent “leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.” England and Germany awak- ened to their northern national heritage: the mythology and legend, the history and art of the Middle Ages. Walpole wrote his Castle of Otranto and built his Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill. Although the full fruits of the seed were not garnered until after 1800, with the genera- [111] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE tion of Byron and Scott and Hugo, of Constable and Delacroix, there began already an increasing harvest. To the romantic enthusiasts, pictur- esqueness and naturalness, nationality and relig- ion, all seemed embodied not in classic architec- ture, but in the Gothic. Even in America where classic influence was so strong there was soon a romantic undercur- rent. Jefferson, whose choice of a mountaintop as the site for his classic house was itself a romantic act, brought in the English landscape garden. Side by side with the first calm Greek monuments rose others, few at first, which took their inspiration from the Middle Ages. Even before the Revolution Jefferson had pro- posed a Gothic garden temple. Latrobe gave the cathedral builders in Baltimore an alterna- tive Gothic design, in which he came quite abreast of the best English knowledge of the style at that time. In a Philadelphia country- seat, Sedgeley, he made, just before the eight- eenth century closed, the first American at- tempt to revive the Gothic mansion. Its little lodge still stands, though modified out of recog- nition. Godefroi, a French refugee in Balti- [112] mt 062 la (ape ie i pe AN te Lf ae ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC more, built for the Sulpicians the Chapel of St. Mary, with Gothic forms but poorly under- stood. It was the first church of the Gothic revival in America. Latrobe, Mills and Strickland all indulged in Gothic exercises as an occasional relief from the classic. Latrobe’s Bank of Philadelphia, vaulted throughout in masonry, was the earliest and worthiest of these buildings. It has long been swept away, as have the first gimcrack churches and Masonic temples of Strickland and his con- temporaries in Philadelphia and New York. As time went on others gained a firmer grasp of the style and established it in the far South at Charleston and at Savannah. At Milledgeville, the old capital of Georgia, the state buildings were made Gothic in the ’thirties. Alexander Jackson Davis, another devotee of the classic for public buildings, likewise took up Gothic forms. He used them for the old New York University building on Washington Square, and built a great Gothic country-seat for Robert Gilmor of Baltimore, a pioneer collector of old masters. Washington Irving, in remodeling Sunnyside, his house at Tarrytown, gave the romantic [113] Le 2 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE movement a new impetus. Robert Dale Owen, before building the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, reached the conclusion, by an elaborate train of reasoning, that the Roman- esque phase of medieval art was best suited to be a national style. The structure, erected from the designs of James Renwick, had a picturesque grouping of towers. On the seaboard by the end of the ‘thintigs peo- ple began to tire of the endless repetition of the temple house. Rational and satiric literary on- slaughts against it were made by Cooper and others. The “English cottage style’ was cham- pioned by Andrew Jackson Downing, the first American to make a profession of landscape gardening. Davis joined with him in publish- ing books which gave numerous models. The cottages of wood and stucco, with steep roofs, traceried eaves and latticed windows, multiplied rapidly in the North, while in the South some of the finest plantation houses were now Gothic. Davis built Belmead, above Richmond, on the lines of a famous English house, Kast Barsham. Staunton Hill, one of the two great Bruce eae opposed its Gothic gables and [114] ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC porches to the Greek porticoes of the other, Berry Hill. Meanwhile in England, Pugin was beginning to preach a revival of “Christian architecture” with a new fervor, and to practise it with a new knowledge. At least for churches, the Gothic forms were now felt to be more appropriate. Trinity Church in New York, which had never abandoned the old tradition of Gothic, entrusted its architectural fortunes in 1839 to Richard Upjohn, a newcomer from England. He built the church still standing at the head of Wall Street, in honest materials, with competent familiarity with the rich forms of English Gothic. Renwick likewise displayed an accom- plished mastery of Gothic structure and disposi- tions in Grace Church and St. Patrick’s Ca- thedral in New York. More solid and more simple than these churches were buildings of another class for which the military architecture of the Middle Ages suggested a Gothic form. These were the prisons, to which the reformers of the ’thirties gave great attention. The improvement of the horrible conditions prevailing in prisons of an [115] ra) ies eles ee oes a principle of solitary confinement, hile a adopted a decade later by Latrobe in the Pen n tentiary at Richmond. At the same time Mangin designed a prison for New Yous onan iHeen of medieval forms. [116] xX A CONFUSION OF TONGUES CHAPTER X A CONFUSION OF TONGUES THE choice between classic and Gothic, which Latrobe first offered to the Cathedral trustees, rapidly widened to include other styles. The struggle between them did not issue, as it had in earlier centuries, with the victory of either one, but both continued, subdivided further, and re- ceived the addition of many more. The reason, here as abroad, lay in the growth of historical knowledge, one of the most characteristic pro- ducts of the nineteenth century, which for the first time made the forms of many styles familiar to a single generation. The historical spirit had already contributed largely to the growth of classicism and romanticism, and to their division into Roman and Greek, Gothic and Romanesque phases. To these were now added styles un- connected with the classic and romantic pro- grams. Soon there was created among designers the conscious principle of complete freedom of [119] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE choice between the various historical styles. A given style was adopted on grounds of personal preference or supposed suitability to the problem in hand. The “Battle of the Styles” was on. At first the field of choice was wide, and the contestants were informed with little knowledge of many of the styles they championed, Even the “Italian villas” would scarcely have been recognized in Italy. The “chalets” and “Moor- ish cottages,” however, and such phantasms as Barnum’s house, Iranistan, at Bridgeport, were, after all, exceptions. More pervasive was the French influence of the Second Empire. The French architect Lemoulnier brought the style to Boston in the middle of the century. Made popular by the completion of the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville, it was taken up officially, horribly brutalized, in a multitude of government offices and public buildings after the Civil War, such as the State Department in Washington, the old Post Offices of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. In dwellings the mansard roof covered the land. | Less serious than the mere variety of style, which here, as in Europe, left the craftsman un- [120] A CONFUSION OF TONGUES sustained by solid traditions of form, was the vulgarization of all styles in the bourgeois democracy of the growing towns. Never in the world had means been more diffused than in the North after the Civil War. Never had there been so raw a society as that which sprang up in the newer western regions. The democracy of Old Hickory and of the first settlement of the Northwest had at least acknowledged the gods of the classic Olympus. In the crude towns of the gold rush and of the boomers the only guides were whim and ostentation. The parvenus of the East had none better. The American indi- vidualism which demanded a house different from that of one’s neighbor was unrestrained by the taste of a settled aristocracy, the tenacity of peasants, or the impotence of a herded pro- letariat. What have been called the “Dark Ages” of American architecture have indeed often been painted blacker than they were. There was no time when good work was not being done. The last of the old leaders and traditions survived to overlap with the new. Each of the passing move- ments produced certain works which have merit [121] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE and value. What was unique in degree perhaps, as compared with Europe at the same time or with America before or since, was the relative submergence of these leaders ‘and these works in the mass of vulgarity. The leaders were still few, the mass, greater than ever before, still un- leavened. The machine was then a new toy, every fresh triumph of which was eagerly acclaimed. The power scroll-saw was quickly seized on as offer- ing a substitute for tracery and carving. Its fantastic brackets supported the wide eaves of the Victorian house, its curves filled the panels. The casting of iron made the duplication of molded detail easy. At first used frankly in light balconies and railings, it was later sanded and painted in imitation of stone, for the multi- plication of the orders over the fronts of ware- houses and shops, and even for the great dome added to the enlarged Capitol in Washington. In brickmaking and bricklaying mechanical per- fection of shape, uniformity of color, smoothness of surface and fineness of jointing became the ruling ideas. The technical ability to make glass in large sheets was turned to account in houses [122] A CONFUSION OF TONGUES as well as in shops, with an avidity which did not discriminate between public display and domestic intimacy. The prevailing confusion was increased by the vast new influx of immigrants from Europe. They flocked into the lands opened by the Pacific railways, and to the factories flourishing behind tariff barriers and eager for foreign labor not yet accustomed to the American standard of means and comfort. Among the Germans who fled from the repressions of ’forty-eight or the aggres- sive Prussian policy of the ’sixties were many men of technical capacity, to whom fell much of the work of the decade following the Civil War. In Germany itself, however, taste was then at an ebb. ‘The forms of the florid northern Renais- sance which these men imported, and which burgeoned in the street architecture of the seventies, added to the rank disorder. In the midst of a like wilderness in Victorian England, the voice of Ruskin was raised in praise of an other-worldliness which would restore sacrifice to religion, truth to construction. Re- coiling from the materialism and industrialism of the time, he could see salvation only in a pious [123] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE return to the spirit of the Middle Ages, which he found embodied only in its own forms. Thus the Gothic received a new impetus. His identifi- cation of artistic merit with moral qualities— “truth” of structure, nobility of material, and human devotion as expressed in lavish adornment by carving and color, led his admiration to the southern, Italian work, and this became the chief ingredient of the later Victorian Gothic. Amer- ican adherents were many. The churches were not the only buildings to feel their hands, which were exercised even on the very temples of materialism—the banks. Such institutions of taste as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the newly founded Boston Museum of Fine Arts all housed themselves, in the ’seventies, in palaces of a doubtful Gothic, sup- posedly Italian, with pointed arches of vari- colored stones. Memorial Hall at Harvard re- mains as the most ambitious and important monument of the style. There were not lacking men who dared to . laugh at “consistency of style” and to combine elements from many styles to create a hybrid, [124] | A CONFUSION OF TONGUES personal means of expression. Frank Furness of Philadelphia—in spite of his Academy—was one of these, whose buildings, now thought of more as aberrations, had the power to fire the youthful enthusiasm of a later apostle of indi- viduality, Louis Sullivan. Into the welter of prejudice, ignorance and wilfulness came a new generation of architects trained abroad in the great Paris school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which the empire of Napoleon III had given a fresh prestige. The first to make his influence felt was Henry Hob- son Richardson, a Southerner, whom the outcome of the war sent north to the rarefied Boston of Emerson and Ruskin. Personally of enormous vigor, Richardson was not at home in the fashionable Victorian Gothic of his first essays. In Trinity Church he turned to the cruder and more elemental Romanesque of southern France and Spain, in which, as he went on, he discerned a suitability to American conditions and environ- ment. ‘Towers and broad low arches in pictur- esque array were mantled with the rugged stonework of Auvergne. Painters, carvers and craftsmen, enlisted with a new enthusiasm, [125] worked side by side in the decorwan | ae ah jails, idee ssi ole image of what they thought architecture i in att ought’ to be. son to the Beaux-Arts. On his first teen Seas peters the war he had establish a generation were trained. He had, however. gone back to France, and it was after 187 0 whe he came again to America and began to gi | racies. Hunt, forceful and unintimidate his clients, established the style of their towr [126] Ke viydjepepiyg ‘Aivus}usg Useyseyy vuJ, TVAIAMY OLNLOD AXIUVET THY, Unasnyy piuvajisuuag ay}, fo fisazimop QLOW} [IG] —SAONAISININAY ALATIY) psovay JwInzoanyory Ud fo fisajinop Bist h. kieae « A CONFUSION OF TONGUES country palaces, drawing his suggestions from the chateaux of the Valois. The great mansions of Fifth Avenue took their type from his houses for William K. Vanderbilt, for John Jacob Astor, for Commodore Gerry; the Newport “cottages,” from his “Ochre Court,” “The Breakers,” and “Marble House.” The finest, perhaps, was the first-named, al- ready within two generations a prey of the wrecker, like most of the other great town houses of that era. Still romantic, high roofed, turreted, and many chimneyed, it offered its rich facades and vast monumental rooms as a back- ground for the exotic pageantry of America’s first gilded age. More splendid still was Biltmore, the Vander- bilt chateau in North Carolina, where Hunt strove to create for his clients an illusion truly feudal. Blois itself was pillaged for the idea of the great staircase. Accomplished detail and fine masonry made the pastiche no unworthy one. For the decoration Hunt gathered around him a group of artists who worked with an enthusiasm of emulation in what they felt to be a true artistic Renaissance. Meanwhile, in the minor house architecture, a [127 ] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE new force was making itself felt—the English “Queen Anne.” William Morris, the father of the revival of handicraft in the Arts and Crafts movement, in his “Red House” on Bexley Heath had started a return to the homely domestic building of brick in the days of Anne, when medieval and classic motives were still freely mingled. Half-timber, clustered chimneys, rough-cast gables, barred casements, and molded sheathing—favorite motives with English de- signers of the school, like Norman Shaw—ap- peared in America with the English building at the Centennial Exposition. At first they were borrowed with little thought, as in the houses by a host of imitators of Shaw and Eastlake, or the fashionable casinos at Newport and Short Hills by the new firm of McKim, Mead and White. These men, however, had grasped the deeper implications of the movement, which involved not the copying of current English idioms but the study of local characteristics and materials in the early American vernacular. The three men, even before they formed their partnership, took, in company with Bigelow, what they came afterward to call their “famous trip” along the [128] A CONFUSION OF TONGUES New England coast, in the Centennial year. They saw the old houses of Salem and Ports- mouth, the fragments assembled at Indian Hill by the pioneer collector, Ben Perley Poore. On their return they launched a Colonial revival, which, fantastic at first in its mixture and over- loading of detail, gradually gained adherents, knowledge and strength. ‘The old materials, the “Harvard brick” of New England, the ledge- stone of Pennsylvania were taken up and given once more a sympathetic handling. In Florida, John Carrére and Thomas Hast- ings, just back from their training abroad, inaugurated a return to the local Spanish tradi- tions in their great hotels, their church and houses there. In Philadelphia two young men, Walter Cope and John Stewardson, early cut off by death, adopted English collegiate models—Tudor or Elizabethan—at Bryn Mawr, at Princeton, at Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Their loving study of simple textures was to be perpetuated with richer forms by a whole school—Eyre and Day and Klauder and their successors—and was ultimately, with the complete adoption of the [129] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE style by Princeton and Yale, to have a wide in- fluence in American universities, as well as in domestic building. The romantic strain, so strong in Richardson, lived on in the Gothic of Bertram Goodhue and of his erstwhile partner Ralph Adams Cram. The early Gothic revivalists, as well as the first followers of Ruskin, had mastered the forms rather than the spirit of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile Morris had taught his lesson, Sed- ding and Bodley in England had worked more freely in their chosen style, with greater sym- pathy for materials and craftsmanship. These qualities now appeared in the American Gothic. Cram was a fervent literary disciple of Rus- kin, Morris and the leaders of the Oxford move-~ ment; Goodhue was a winsome youth who had read Goethe almost in the nursery and at fifteen had blazoned on his wall the motto: “Art pre- exists in Nature, and Nature is reproduced in Art.” He had absorbed Gothic forms in Ren- wick’s office. They flowed magically from his gifted pen which created marvelous dream cities of Germany, of medieval Italy, of Persia. To- gether the young knights-errant went forth lance [130] A CONFUSION OF TONGUES in hand, to tilt against the powers of industrial- ism, to rescue piety and craftsmanship. Their first success was won in alliance with the High Churchmen. They took up the ritual arrangements and the traditional forms of the English church as they had been cut off by Henry VIII. All Saints’ at Ashmont, their earliest triumph, built in 1892, shows a free use of this last phase of Gothic, with walls of brown- seamed granite, and windows of rich glass, heavily leaded. In their later churches they were to range more widely within the styles of the Middle Ages, from the Early English of Cram’s Calvary Church in Pittsburgh to the Byzantine of Goodhue’s St. Bartholomew in New York. At West Point the craggy site of the Military Academy suggested a castellated treatment with a superbly rugged chapel. Although for years Goodhue shunned Italy for fear of exposing himself to the spell of the classic, he did not dis- dain to work occasionally with classic forms, and achieved notable success with them in his Cali- fornia houses. In Cuba and California, too, he was to work in the lavish Spanish Colonial style with fine imaginative effect. [131] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE As time went on Goodhue’s Gothic was to be- come less and less a matter of archeology. The English work of Sir Gilbert Scott turned him in a freer direction. St. Vincent Ferrer in New York already shows the influence of Scott's Liverpool Cathedral. After Goodhue’s first sight of Liverpool, he redesigned completely his proposed cathedral in Baltimore, with bolder scale and less traditional details. This was but the first step in a development which was to carry him away from historical forms, into a struggle for freedom of expression, the story of which be- longs to a later chapter. F132] XI THE STAGE OF MODERNISM: NEW MATERIALS AND NEW TYPES x tH ~ e + = i i ' } \ 5 CHAPTER XI THE STAGE OF MODERNISM: NEW MATERIALS AND NEW TYPES Unt late in the nineteenth century architects had worked primarily with the traditional ma- terials, wood, stone and brick, and at the con- ventional problems of the house, the church, the college, the civic building, at most the theater and the bank. Meanwhile modern industrial civilization was coming both to furnish them with new materials of revolutionary properties, and to present them with problems in the creation of new types of buildings for industry, transporta- tion and commerce. Iron and steel, concrete reinforced with steel, were of a strength hitherto unknown in building. The stations and bridges called into being by the railways, the vast factories which ease of communication en- couraged, the offices for business thus built up have little precedent in earlier epochs and are the characteristic structures of our time. [135] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE The industrial revolution, with its division of labor and application of power machinery, had begun in England in the later eighteenth century, and had soon adopted the steam engine, its first great servant. Dependence on English goods had led Hamilton, as one of the first cares of the new state, to encourage American manu- factures. L’Enfant laid out for him a grandiose plan for the new industrial town of Paterson at the falls of the Passaic; Latrobe designed for the Philadelphia Water Works the first steam engine in America. Fulton with his steamboat solved the problem of communication by water on the great rivers and lakes, as well as ulti- mately on the ocean. The steam railroad, in- vented in England, found its chief use in the vast areas of the United States. In the wake of industrialism came the capitalistic organization of society, with its great cities, its vast accumula- tions of wealth, its laboring masses, its imperialistic exploitation of backward regions. Although factory towns using the power of the rivers had appeared in New England soon after 1800, the country remained overwhelm- ingly agricultural until the Civil War. ‘Trans- [136] Se . THE STAGE OF MODERNISM portation and commerce dealt more with the ex- port of raw materials and agricultural products, the import of finer manufactured goods. The stimulus to manufacture given by the war was perpetuated by the high tariff imposed to pay the debt and to insure the rich American market to American factories. The vast unoccupied lands invited the monopolizing of natural re- sources; the absence of legal restraints on inter- nal trade promoted combinations on.a grand scale. New technical inventions—the type- writer, the sewing machine—stimulated by the scarcity and cost of labor, were exploited at home and abroad. The natural wealth of open land and the democracy which it had evoked kept the pros- perity of the many on a high level. The “Amer- ican System” came into being. It involved not so much the grinding down of the masses to pro- duce goods cheaply for sale abroad, as the development of their own capacity to buy more and more material luxuries. The demand was created by democratic passion for equality of standards and by the vast development of ad- vertising among a population enabled to read by [137] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE universal free education. Thus quantity pro- duction could be developed on an unexampled scale, in the midst of a bourgeois prosperity never before approached. The consequences were felt not least in building, which has become one of the greatest of industries in the United States. Of the new materials, iron was the first to find extensive application, in trusses over assembly halls and concourses of unprecedented width, and bridges of wide span. Cast mto columns, iron permitted a new slenderness of interior sup- ports. The international expositions, beginning with the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, had given a great stimulus to the use of large areas of glass, which the development of plate glass arose to satisfy. The shops, the vast department-stores, became so many show-cases of which the walls tended to disappear, the exterior points of sup- port to be as few and far apart as possible. The skylight, on the other hand, enabled museums and exhibition buildings to be made without openings in their walls, with great courts roofed with glass and iron. These new possibilities, like [138] | THE STAGE OF MODERNISM all new resources, were exploited at first without appreciation of their corresponding drawbacks. With the development of new processes, steel succeeded wrought and cast iron in construction. Rolled into beams of form mathematically de- vised to give the greatest resistance to bending, it permitted level floor spans to have greater width than ever before. In the ’eighties such rolled beams were imported and still precious. In channels, angles and plates steel could be riveted together in a rigid frame of unpre- cedented strength. At first the supposition was that metal, being noncombustible, was proof against fire, but steel - was soon found to twist and bend in fire with disastrous results. It proved necessary to case the metal in fireproofing, preferably brick or terra cotta which had been through fire in its very making. The impulse to the arts of fire and clay was great. Not only structural terra cotta, but glazed faience of white and of the greatest variety of colors became available. Pressed in molds, it permitted a multiplication of ornament that was to be far from an unmixed blessing. Latest of the new materials to receive wide [139] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE application was concrete. The Romans, with their remarkable volcanic cement, had developed a system of massive concrete construction well adapted to their imperial requirements and their vast bodies of unskilled laborers. A modern equivalent waited on the discovery of an equally good binding material. It was found in Port- land cement, the use of which increased rapidly in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. For the superstruc- ture of buildings modern science and economy provided a substitute for the enormous massive- ness of Roman concrete. This was the system of reinforcing with iron or steel, first devised in France by Joseph Monier in the ’sixties, A composite structure was thus achieved, strong against both compression and tension, with the steel protected against both rust and fire. Equally novel in relation to past civilizations were some of the classes of buildings now raised to importance. The railway-station took the place of the old city gate as the point of arrival and departure. In the first stations, in America as in England, the fundamental form was the train shed, which, with the multiplication of [140] THE STAGE OF MODERNISM tracks and the use of iron arches of great span, acquired a certain beauty—lost, however, in smoke and grime. The development of the “book- ing-hall,” the waiting-room or concourse, gave a more grateful element to emphasize. With the adoption of electric power and the disappearance of the tracks below ground, it became the principal feature, filled with a flowing multitude. The factory early assumed its fundamental forms—the storied mill for multiplied uniform looms or light machines, the long shed with its traveling crane for heavy manufacturing. When wood was still universal for the upper floors, the striving for security against fire developed a standardized mill construction, with heavy plank- ing on large transverse beams which brought a concentrated weight to the outer walls at short intervals. Economy of structure suggested the concentration of the supports, too, at these points. A range of piers, diminishing as they rose, was the natural resulting form, impressive by its uniformity and length. When concrete replaced brick and wood, the piers spaced them- selves more widely; conditions demanded an architectural treatment of novel character and proportion. [141] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE The sites of American cities on navigable rivers of a size which dwarfs the Thames and the Seine has made their great bridges of steel, high above the masts of ships, striking features in the urban picture. Although at first the work solely of engineers, they operated powerfully on the imagination of architects, as Louis Sullivan has testified, to encourage the use of the new material and stimulate an enfranchisement from tradi- tional constructive forms. In the old cities of Europe the heights of build- ings were officially limited. Karly American efforts in this direction were regarded as in- vasions of the property rights guaranteed by the federal constitution, and for a century there was no other restriction on height than the strength of materials and the willingness to climb stairs. When iron and the elevator came into use in the ’seventies the limit of possibility was raised enormously. Instead of spreading, as in London and Paris and Vienna, buildings, unrestrained by the state, shot upward on the preferred sites. The rentals from many stories increased the value of the land, and, by a circular train of causes, forced neighbors to build higher and [142] A i ae % ‘ ae ; be =e A a). ee a -> ye are = THE STAGE OF MODERNISM higher. The island site of Manhattan, often named as the determining factor, was not so in truth—the incomparable majority of its build- ings remained, and still remains, of three and four stories. The most striking early illustra- tion of the tendency, indeed, was not in New York but in Chicago, rebuilding on the vast plain after its great fire. In the struggle skyward of the first ‘“elevator- buildings,” it soon occurred to designers to sup- port the floors entirely on columns of iron, leav- ing the outer walls with only their own weight to carry. ‘Thus were created such buildings as that of the World in New York, with a height of three hundred and seventy-five feet. Here how- ever the self-supporting walls reached a thick- ness of nine feet, even of twenty or more at some points; the value of the lower stories was com- promised. At this moment the decisive step was taken of supporting the wall itself, as well as the floors, on the frame of metal, reducing the wall to a mere veneer or curtain. This was first taken by William Le Baron Jenney in parts of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, designed in the year 1883 and built from 1884 to 1886. [143] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE The economy was vast, the last hindrance to ascent was swept away. William Holabird and Martin Roche, from Jenney’s office, used the same scheme throughout their Tacoma Building built in the two following years. These build- ings still had cast iron columns and wrought iron beams, but the conception of a continuous steel frame with riveted joints was already present, and the materials were soon available. The sky now became indeed the limit—the skyscraper was born. These were the economic and constructive de- velopments, of vast import and novelty, by which the stage was set for new creations in form. Not since the Gothic was invented had there been structures so revolutionary. What artistic ideals were to govern them; what character were they to take? Was man to be mastered by the giants of his creation, or to master them? The answer lay with leaders of the generation coming to maturity as the century drew toward its close. [144] XIT WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE? THE POLES OF MODERNISM: FUNCTION AND FORM CHAPTER XII WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE? THE POLES OF MODERNISM: FUNCTION AND FORM Two forces struggled for mastery among the men of the ’nineties. One took its impulse from science, the overwhelming power which had dominated the nineteenth century; the other, re- acting against science, worked to establish the independence of art. One exalted truth as the supreme principle, in art as in science; the other raised beauty again to independent being. One typified the loving surrender of man to nature; the other, his victory over nature. The doctrine of truth in art, of obedience to nature, is as old as the ancients. Many a dif- ferent generation has been able to interpret this as the guiding principle of its own artistic striv- ings. It was with Herder and Goethe that it took on the meaning it was to have in the nine- teenth century. From a model of ordered unity, [147] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE nature became the source of creative inspiration. The artist, filled with its spirit, in impressing form on his materials, accepts the needs and use, and gives characteristic beauty: . . bis in den kleinsten Theil notwendig schin wie Baume Gottes. The mid-nineteenth century lay under the spell of nature. To the romantic interest was added the scientific. The study of the earth, of plants and animals, culminating in the work of Darwin, gave a new significance to the idea of evolution, as the progressive adaptation of or- ganic form to function and _ environment. - Religion and art alike were influenced by the new concepts. Merit in painting was identified with minute “truth to nature”; beauty in archi- tecture, with truth to use and structure. Keats was the voice of his time when he said,“ Beauty — is truth, truth beauty.” Frank outward expression of the nature of buildings, of their internal arrangements, and of their construction had, indeed, been characteristic of many earlier styles. As a more conscious principle, purism in the use of structural elements—a rule of “reason” and “good sense’ — [148] OE SNES 28 Send oe ae WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE had been increasing in French classic architec- ture since the seventeenth century. Even the Greek revivalists in America, who had masked so many uses and arrangements in the form of the temple, had been careful to limit the column to its original and typical use as an isolated support. At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, there was indif- ference to structural suggestions, but the keenest striving to express arrangement and “character.” By the middle of the nineteenth century the demand for “truth” had become insistent. Pugin wrote: “There should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, 99 ¢¢ construction or propriety;” “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construc- tion of the building.” Ruskin added a moral fervor of judgment, casting into outer darkness, as “unnatural and monstrous,” the styles of Rome and of the Renaissance which he found wanting in structural sincerity. On _ the Continent Viollet-le-Duc wrote: “There are two ways of expressing truth in architecture; it must fulfil with scrupulous exactness all the conditions imposed by necessity . . . employ materials with due regard for their qualities and capaci- [149] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE | ties.” Semper summed up all in the formula: “Every technical product a resultant of use and material.” Evolutionary theory was meanwhile under- mining the imitation of historic styles from another side. ‘The principle of national indi- viduality and organic development was applied in tracing the relation of the art of past schools to race, environment and time. ‘These ideas were fundamentally hostile to every “revival” of historical forms in the modern world. It was but gradually that they were followed to their extreme consequences. Pugin and Rus- kin and their American disciples still thought the way of salvation lay through the Gothic for which they claimed a superiority in truth of ex- pression. Viollet-le-Duc, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, came ulti- mately to deny “the propriety of imposing on our age any reproduction of antique or medieval forms.” Semper announced that “the solution of modern problems must be freely developed from the premises given by modernity.” He was himself, however, still content to do his work with historical elements; and Viollet-le-Duc’s at- [150] o? a ae ++ pie a = ae Sy ee eRe a i. oe ee ee WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE tempts to deduce new architectural forms from the sporadic employment of iron in construc- tion had little success. They were too purely cerebral, too little left. We must recognize, also, that the problems and materials currently offered to the designer in 1870 had not yet changed enough from those of previous centuries, or yet crystallized enough to give sufficient basis for a revolutionary change of forms. A. new continent, a new society, a new com- munity, was needed for the realization of “modernist” ideas. In America commercialism, industrial society, had developed unrestrained. Patriotic motives added the call for “Amer- ican style” to the more general demand for a “modern style.” In the ’seventies and early eighties, while the Kast sought to assimilate itself to cultivated Europe, the West gloried in the American “Innocence” exaggerated by Mark Twain. A conjunction especially favorable existed in Chicago. The great fire left a tabula rasa—all was to be made new. For once there was an opportunity for young men in that most difficult and responsible of arts, where the “younger [151] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE men” are usually past fifty. On the active and independent spirits who were attracted to the city, the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc and Semper made a deep impression. Van Brunt of Kansas City had translated Viollet’s Discourses; John Root published excerpts from Semper’s work. The Western Association of Architects was founded, with pronounced radical tendencies; a new journal, the Inland Architect, gave its sponsors a voice and an audience. There was a ferment of discussion, experiment and emula- tion. From the Chicago ferment had come the decisive structural invention, the steel frame carrying the walls as well as the floors. From it, too, before 1890, emerged three men: Daniel Burnham, John Root and Louis Sullivan. Burnham described himself when he once called another “a dreamer with his feet on the ground.” A mystic, alive to beauty and to nature, and with a gift of friendship, he was yet of fixed purpose and immense determination. Great in executive capacity, obsessed with the idea of bigness, of power, he was the architect who grasped the significance of American in- [152] i aq a g a ‘- “a . a WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE dustrialism, with its vast growth, its organiza- tion, its division of labor. It was he who created the type of American architect’s office of to-day, with its delegation of responsibility to designers, structural and mechanical engineers, specifica- tion writers, superintendents and executives. It was he more than any other to whom the Ameri- can business building owes its amplitude, its internal clarity of arrangement. Root, his partner through the years of struggle, was the artist, the designer—magnetic, facile, finished, eager to shine, receptive, en- amored of the new. In the race skyward Burn- ham and Root were in the van; in the struggle for a new form of expression Root was the popu- lar standard-bearer. The decisive structural in- ventions, however, were not theirs; the inspired artistic creation was made by another. In Louis Sullivan, Chicago found its poet. Half French, half Irish, he had the analytical mind of a scientist, the soul of a dreamer and artist. Overflowing with romantic enthusiasm for nature, dazzled by the logical splendor of mathematics, fascinated by Taine and Darwin, [153] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE abased before the titanic creative power of Michelangelo, he had passed rapidly through the discipline of school and of the Beaux-Arts— assimilating, questioning, feeling. At seventeen enamored of Chicago, its energy, its wide horizons of lake and prairie; at twenty-five al- ready established in a position to build his air- castles; at thirty he was a, prophet to youth, in lyrical outbursts of rushing words, enveloping an authentic philosophy. Among the architects of our day, whose ex- pressed notions are apt to be fragments from inconsistent systems, his ideas had an intuitive harmony and value, under “the dominant, all- pervading thought that a spontaneous and vital art must come fresh from nature, and can only thus come.” The artist is “to arrest and typify in materials the harmonious and inter-blended rhythms of nature and humanity.” To him reason and analysis were not all. Sensitive, passionate and courageous, he illustrated in his own career that “to the master mind . . . imbued with the elemental signifi- cance of nature’s moods, humbled before the future and the past, art and its outworkings are largely tragic.” [154] WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE Sullivan’s early work, like the work of Root and so many others of less genius, was colored by Richardson’s influence. The treatment of the Auditorium Building, with its heavy masonry walls and arches, was suggested by Richardson’s design for the Field warehouse. From Richard- son must also have come the first suggestion of the foliate ornament which Sullivan afterward developed so characteristically. On the comple- tion of the vast auditorium followed a break- down, recuperation, a long communing with nature, a gathering of new forces. The return to Chicago in 1890 marks the opening of Sulli- van’s great creative period. His first problem was the novel one of the steel-frame office building. The frame must be encased for protection against fire. How might its indispensable presence be expressed? How might the monstrous, unprecedented pile be given artistic form? “He felt at once that the new form of engineering was revolutionary, de- manding an equally revolutionary architectural mode. That masonry construction, in so far as tall buildings were concerned, was a thing of the past, to be forgotten, that the mind might be free to face and solve new problems in new functional [155] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE forms. That the old idea of superimposition must give way before the sense of vertical con- tinuity.” So Sullivan wrote in his Autobiog- raphy of an Idea, a generation later. The Wain- wright Building in St. Louis, designed before the close of the year, was the perfect embodiment of this conception. z His own interpretation of the problem formu- lated most clearly his whole philosophy of art: “It is my belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution. This I believe to be natural law. Let us examine, then, carefully the elements, let us search out this contained sug- gestion, this essence of the problem. . . . “Beginning with the first story, we give this a main entrance that attracts the eye to its loca- tion, and the remainder of the story we treat in a more or less liberal, expansive, sumptuous way—a way based exactly on the practical neces- sities, but expressed with a sentiment of largeness and freedom. The second story we treat in a similar way but usually with milder pretension. Above this, throughout the indefinite number of typical office tiers, we take our cue from the in- dividual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, with- out more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike. This brings us to the attic, [156] J Pes ny $ Courtesy of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue Associates Later Goruic The Chapel at West Point Tue STEEL FRAME The Wainright Building, St. Louis ee Es So WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE which, having no division into office cells, and no special requirement for lighting, gives us the power to show by means of its broad expanse of wall, and its dominating weight and character, that which is the fact—namely, that the series of office tiers has come definitely to an end. . “We must now heed the imperative voice of emotion. “It demands of us, What is the chief charac-’ teristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very open organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in his expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exulta- tion that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line—that it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of most bald, most sinister, most forbidding condi- iE. ~The true, the immovable philosophy of the architectural art . . . let me now state, for it brings to the solution of the problem a final, comprehensive formula: ~ Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work- horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds over all the coursing sun, form ever follows func- [157] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE tion, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. . . . “And thus, when native instinct and sensibility shall govern the exercise of our beloved art. . . when our architects shall cease strutting hand- cuffed and vainglorious in the asylum of a foreign school . . . when we know and feel that Nature is our friend, not our implacable enemy, then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a natural and satisfying art, an architecture that will soon become a fine art in the true, the best sense of the word, an art that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the people.” In the Wainwright Building, wall surface was abandoned for a system of pier and panel which symbolized the concentrated support of the steel columns. That the terra cotta which gave fire protection was no self-supporting masonry, but a mere casing, was expressed with success by a delicate surface ornament. The height was emphasized by unbroken continuity of the multi- plied vertical piers. The building became indeed “every inch a proud and soaring thing,” filled with the “force and power of altitude.” In the design Sullivan rose superior to any merely mechanical theory of expression. He achieved unity of form arbitrarily. The steel [158] WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE occurs only at alternate piers, yet all are alike. The artist has felt, not calculated. The build- ing is vitally unified in a form deeply felt by its creator. Such works emphasized the novel element in modern life, rather than its continuity with the past. Their realistic treatments of its subject matter had an obvious relation with the realistic movements of the nineteenth century in painting and sculpture, in literature and music. Painting from Courbet through the impressionists and neo-impressionists, sculpture in the hands of Carpeaux and Rodin, the music-drama of Wagner, which moved Sullivan so deeply, the novels and plays of Tolstoi, Flaubert, Zola and Ibsen, all consciously sought characteristic beauty through truth to nature, rather than ab- stract beauty through relations of form. The men of fundamental greatness, indeed, preserved a sense of form in the other arts, as in architec- ture. The lesser men, however, the imitators— their attention distracted from creation to reproduction—fell into a chaos which we see, for instance, in Monet’s successors, where all form is dissolved in light. [159] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Against this formlessness, this scientific ob- — servation of nature, this equation of beauty with truth or half-truth, there had begun, even before 1890, a reaction which was to have far-reaching consequences. Cézanne, still obscure and unre- garded, wrote, “All in nature is modeled accord- ing to the sphere and the cone and the cylinder,” and undertook, as he said, to build a bridge between the impressionists and the Louvre. Scientific anatomy and photographie fore- shortening began to give way. In literature Whitman inaugurated a renaissance of verse, with a multitude of novel experiments in form. — New leaders in music tended to abandon efforts to express literary ideas and to revert to the pure language of tone, enriched by new scales and — harmonies. In this renewed worship of form there was much that emphasized relation to the great past. Ingres and Greco and Bach were hailed and worshiped as moderns. One of the first of the movements to restore the supremacy of abstract form was gathering force in American architecture in the New York of the late ’eighties. Its standard bearers were Mc- Kim, Mead and White. Charles Follen McKim, [160] WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE of Quaker ancestry, austere and delicate in his tastes, with indomitable allegiance to artistic ideals, had been the third American to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Stanford White, virile and overflowing with energy, reveling in rich materials, in color and ornament, had passed an apprenticeship with Richardson. His tall figure, with red bristling hair, was visible above the crowd in every gay artistic assemblage. Mead, the wise counselor, had been trained in the school at Florence. Of the three, he was the only one who began with a leaning to the classic. The portfolios which McKim and White brought back from France were full of the picturesque high-roofed chateaux which had inspired Hunt. Their first designs used medieval forms. Ir- regular, romantic dispositions governed their early work, not only in the Queen Anne manner, but in the revived Colonial for which they were the chief sponsors. Their stimulus to a calmer unity of form came from one of their designers, the gifted and un- fortunate Joseph Morrill Wells. On the walls of the office still hang his two sober drawings of the Farnese Palace and of Lescot’s wing of the [161] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Louvre, representing his classic ideals, which be- came those of his great associates. Although no word of theory ever came from any of them, they must have felt intuitively what a French critic — later wrote, that “instead of constructing first, without thinking of the final appearance, promis- ing to use the nature of the construction in the decoration, one should banish the ingenuities of structure among the secondary means, unworthy to appear in the completed work.” Like men in other periods of renewed interest in unity and purity of form, the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, they turned to the classic, in which the preeminent manifestations of pure or abstract form, as opposed to a structural or plastic emphasis, have doubtless been achieved. Its elements—masses and spaces of geometrical simplicity—offered an _ established language widely understood. For this second classic revival there was little stimulus in contemporary Europe. It was American in its origins and was to remain Amer- ican in its leadership. Although the leaders were men of European training, it was not the style of their French masters which determined theirs. To characteristic emphasis and lavish [162] oS? eee a a a ee: ae WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE dynamic energy, they opposed an almost mathe- matical simplicity, a Dorian harmony. It can scarcely be doubted that the underlying influence must be sought in the heritage of classic monu- ments from the formative period of the nation which McKim and his associates had been the first to appreciate. Thus the founders of the republic, after a half-century of confusion, once more imposed their artistic ideal. An interpretation of architecture, as they tacitly conceived it, in terms of mass and space, instead of structure, was indeed to be the theory of the future. Its foundations were laid by Ger- man and Italian thinkers independently, but after the first decisive American works. Wells, McKim and White thus led a new van. Their mature work was not merely a belated historical revival, a continuation of the nineteenth century eclecticism, willing to choose between all styles, classic being one. It was rather an affirmation of a different principle of style. It used classic elements, to be sure, but it was not merely imita- tive. It reaffirmed the supremacy of form, and worked in the classical spirit of unity, uniformity and. balance. The earliest building fully to embody the new [163] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE ~ manner was the group of the four Villard houses _ in New York, built in 1885. No attempt was made to demark or characterize them individ- ually; on the contrary they were welded into a single great palace, simple and uniform. Brown- stone, retained as the material over the protests — of the architects, was handled with fine feelmg. — The details were suggested by the Italian Renaissance, with reminiscences of the Cancel- laria, but the building was far from being a copy. Its significance lay less in its derivative — forms than in its harmonious order and serenity of spirit. A series of genial works quickly followed. In the Century Club and in Madison Square Garden, on which White and Wells worked to- gether, the Renaissance details were vitalized by a rich flowering of ornament held within simple — bounds, and executed in terra cotta with all White’s understanding of materials. Before the close of the decade came McKim’'s — design for the Boston Library. The square mass was unbroken by any projection, the cornice made a continuous bounding line. The long ranks of massive arches were carried blandly, without the [164] YOR MIN ‘Sosnoy PATA IT, WHOS] TVOISSVI7) OL NWALaAY ATL YT, ANYM PUD poaTy ‘umiyoyy {0 fisajunop ea? Areaqry oyqng uoysog ayy, aOVAUAG JO DISA AN, WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE slightest interruption, across the variations of interior use. In Paris Gaudet was saying what a great effect such a uniform front would have by contrast to the Beaux-Arts system of articula- tion, but there his words fell on unheeding ears. McKim’s initiative was independent. The sug- gestion came to him doubtless from the Library of Ste. Geneviéve in Paris, built when France it- self was under Greek influence, but the serried proportions of his design, the boldness and depth of relief gave it a different character, a majesty of its own. Inside, the same harmony prevailed, with a richness and sobriety of sculptured and painted decoration which was new in America. ‘The battleground of the two forces, for the supremacy between form and function, between East and West, was the World’s Fair of 1893. Chicago, which had won the preliminary contest between cities for the privilege of holding the fair, was eagerly alive to its opportunity. But twenty years from a day when it lay in ashes, it was to justify before the world its aspiration to be a world metropolis, a center of civilization and art as well as of trade. The fair was to body forth this dream. [165] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE At first it was thought that the whole work might be given to Burnham and Root. ‘The time was too short. Burnham became Chief of Construction. Root, as consulting architect, be- gan studies to determine the general character of the buildings. These already show an inten- tion to abandon the conservatory aspect of the older expositions, and to suggest permanent buildings—a dream city. ‘They were of a free style, with some recognition of the steel con- struction, but still reminiscent of Richardson’s Romanesque. Meanwhile the architects had been appointed for the individual buildings—five from the East, five from the West. On the eve of their meeting came the death of Root. Many have speculated on what might have been the outcome had he lived. It is doubtful whether it would have been very different. Burnham was already dazzled by the prestige of the Eastern men, whose com- mon training in the Beaux-Arts tradition in- clined them to a formal plan, to unity of the ensemble, and to classic rather than free or medieval forms. ‘They made common cause, while the Western men aimed at personal [166] | : WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE variety. It was thus not wholly arbitrary that the central group, closely knit, fell to the Easterners, the outer buildings, scattered among’ the greenery and the lagoons, to the Western men. The central group became a Court of Honor, to which the designers, throwing aside their preliminary sketches where each had sought to outdo the other, quickly agreed to give a uniform cornice, a uniform brilliant whiteness, and a general congruity of style, the classic. The sheds of steel and wood disappeared behind majestic colonnaded fronts. Within the diver- sity which this still allowed, McKim’s building, suggestive of the Roman baths, with vast columns rising from ground to cornice, was the one to captivate the beholders. The Westerners, with a single exception, ranged freely among the historic styles. Sullivan was the only man to seek a novel expression. Still permeated with subtler historical remin- iscences—Roman, Romanesque and Moorish— his Transportation Building was given a char- acter of its own by its wealth of color, its rich flowering of original ornament about the vast Golden Doorway. [167] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Burnham, keen in his judgment of trends and of men, took as his own designer, in place of Root, Charles Attwood of New York, who seized on McKim’s Roman style, and even outdid him in simplicity, in breadth, and in beauty of pro- portion. Attwood’s great peristyle toward the lake, his Palace of the Fine Arts, mirrored in the lagoon, were of unforgettable dignity and gran- deur. The cumulative impression of the classic phantasm was overwhelming. The throng of visitors, many of whom were seeing large build- ings for the first time, was deeply stirred by the ordered magnificence and harmony of the Court of Honor. The example of unified effort and effect, associated with the classic forms in which it had been achieved, was stamped on the memory of the whole nation. The issue, whether function should determine form from within or whether an ideal form might be imposed from without, had been decided for a generation by a sweeping victory for the formal ideal, [168] eal ‘s s 3 ipa a2 Se ae ae, ; . : oe ce ae eae ee) oe” — ne 1 i TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM a CHAPTER XIII THE TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM THE effect of the Chicago Fair was electric. American architecture turned to the formal, the classical, the monumental. A Roman grandeur now replaced Italian delicacy and the luxuriance of the first works. Coming in the teeth of the hostile reigning theory of function, the work of McKim and his associates was indeed at first attacked as arbi- trary and even as false. The public, however, was quick to respond to the basic appeal of groups of unified and dominated masses, to the musical compositions of interior space. Other architects, often still mouthing an opposite in- herited theory, were borne along by the new current. Although, to many of the later works of the school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts contributed its analytical science and virtuosity of planning, it is mistaken to suppose the movement itself to be, [171] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE as Jacques Gréber has asserted, “prewve de la force d’expansion du génie francais.” ‘The scores of students who have returned from the un- rivaled discipline and emulation of the Paris school, have had here to lay aside their French language of form, and learn anew a language which had been that of their greatest ancestors. Not one has permanently escaped the influence of the American classic. Using the Roman alphabet, the established universal terms of classical form, the American designers made what had been thought a dead language the idiom of current speech, express- ing with unexpected flexibility the ideas of a new age. ‘To a degree unknown in a century of Babel, they made it common to the whole body of designers and workmen, who thus could easily understand one another all over a great conti- nent. They were able to work forward in com- mon effort. A coherent body of tradition was again established. As in the old days before wide historical knowledge, the artist stood on the shoulders of his forerunners. The general nature of his work established, he felt not bound, but free to vary, develop and refine his utter- [172] . Oe, By ENR Te ee a . ~ ee ee . ~ 7 , . = eae ? ees 2 4 oP ee paar] , a Pee " 2 TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM ance. In the sympathetic study of the elements themselves, of profiles, of color, of departures from mechanical regularity through curvature and inclination, of the problems arising in adap- tation to new uses, to a new and vaster scale, he felt he had a sufficient field for his creative powers. McKim and his fellows went on from triumph to triumph, finding in the early buildings of the Republic a supporting tradition and a national sanction. The city of Washington, since the early days, had grown with little direction. At the turn of the century, the men who had made the White City in Chicago were summoned to outline the development of the national capital. Serious changes had been made in the original plan; errors generally felt to be beyond repair. L’En- . fant’s Mall, which was to make a long formal vista westward from the Capitol, had been planted by Downing as a romantic landscape park with winding roads, and trees, irregularly disposed, already grown tall. Squarely across it lay the tracks of a great railroad terminal. The Washington Monument, which was to have stood [173] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE where the vistas of Capitol and White House crossed, had been located, for better foundations, neither just on the one line nor on the other. Burnham and McKim, who with Olmsted the younger and the sculptor St. Gaudens formed the Park Commission, took the bravest and simplest way. In spite of all obstacles, they restored L’Enfant’s plan. Under Burnham’s persuasion the railroad abandoned its devastat- ing central site. The western vista was boldly pointed fair at the Monument, ignoring square- ness. Beyond a terrace to the west, a pool, a vast circular mirror, marked the crossing of the southern vista from the White House. L’En- fant’s plan had gone no farther west or south. The Monument in his plan had stood on the marshy bank of the Potomac. With the same © courage L’Enfant had shown in planning be- yond his day, the new commissioners extended his lines far out over the tidal flats. Thus they created at the outer ends two new monumental sites of the first importance. They destined one for a Lincoln Memorial, the other for a shrine to the founders of the republic. The suggested forms harmonized yet contrasted with those of [174] ; te . i ee oA ’ > —— « 7 a 4 . ‘ ag a oe a, ee ae Seam boat.) aan ot aaa boar oi rors re =a 50 ’ FE ee se ee ne ee ee ears, ee ee Ee ee i dl ny ee oe ee yt erie he i TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM the Capitol, the White House and the Monu- ment. The government buildings, since the Civil War, had run the gamut of materials and of historic styles. The commissioners now pro- posed a return to the calm and uniform classic of the founders. The White House had been defaced by conservatories without; within, Victorian overstuffing and screens of painted glass had given it the character of a Pullman car or a river steamboat. For its enlargement two overshadowing circular pavilions had recently been proposed. McKim swept away the outer excrescences, restored Jefferson’s lateral colon- nades, and subordinated the new offices at the end. Inside, if he did not fully achieve the char- acter of the original work, still imperfectly understood, he at least returned to consonant classical forms. New government buildings established not only the proposed lines on the Mall, but the intended, quiet, formal character of the whole setting for the focal monuments. The Park Commission had no autocratic authority. Its designs were backed by little greater power than their own persuasive force. [175] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE They have been able to withstand every on- slaught, and to-day, after a generation, are estab- lished in their essentials. They justified Burn- ham’s prophetic insight when he said, in his finest utterance: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble and logical diagram, once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing in- sistence. . . . Let your watchword be order and your beacon, beauty.” In San Francisco, in Chicago, in the distant Philippines, Burnham led the way in an imagina- tive reincarnation of the cities. Chicago dis- covered its lake and its rivers. Along the front it created its endless drives and lagoons, pro- jected its civic forum dominating a vast man- made harbor. New York put the railway under ground, and above, created Park Avenue with its colossal uniform buildings. Philadelphia, awaking to its vast wealth, boldly broke its Park- way through a neglected quarter from the center to the Schuylkill at Fairmount. It has crowned [176] RSE i qe Ser 2 Ne Bien ai he - ee We ee Ce hice 6 se a a oa é ‘ a. Se ee ee ee ey ee Y ay ~ : - , ‘ — ee a Ta ne Sere oe a ee ae ee ee a aOR vie Sor gt TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM this acropolis with a great temple of the arts, and is lining the way to its foot with the new homes of its venerable institutions of culture. The reaction against romanticism, evident in these great works of town planning, was equally influential in the design of estates and houses. White had early reverted to the formal garden, which was soon to find a master in Charles Platt. A painter-etcher, saturated with the garden- craft of Italy, he made, for his friends of St. Gaudens’ artistic colony at Cornish, gardens which made his services everywhere in demand. From gardens and their decorative structures it was an easy step to houses and estates treated as a single whole. Broad terraces with steps and fountains, walled parterres with hedges, statu- ary and quiet pools were his elements for an intimate union of architecture and sculpture, of water and vegetation. Sometimes the forms of detail were Italian, as in the Harold McCormick place at Lake Forest, with its terraces above the lake; sometimes they were suggested by early American precedents as in Eastover, or the Manor House at Glen Cove. Always they were tranquil, balanced, serene. These qualities, [177] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE shared with the works of the first leaders of the movement, dominated in the work of Pope, of Delano and Aldrich, and others who now joined in establishing the tone of domestic architecture. The magnificent ostentation of the eighties gave place to an easy refinement, a reserved elegance. In monumental buildings the favorite motives of the early Republic came again to honor. ‘The banks reverted to the models of Latrobe, end- lessly varied. For the largest of them, the National City, McKim took the old New York Merchants Exchange, and placed a Corinthian story above its great Ionic front. Its long colonnade, with that of the old Treasury, gave suggestions for the front of the vast New York Post Office and many another work. A Roman triumphal arch, such as Bulfinch had erected to celebrate Washington’s inauguration, was built by White for the centenary of that event, and made permanent in marble. Mills’ tall Greek Doric column became the model for McKim’s monument to the martyrs of the Prison Ships and for the memorial of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie. The ordered form and classic spirit of the Uni- [178] TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM versity of Virginia, which McKim and White were soon to restore after fire, gave the sugges- tion for their academic groups at Columbia and New York Universities. In each a great library, with low massive dome, dominated a balanced court of sober related buildings. Rarely have there been finer conceptions of the centralized vaulted hall than in these two rotundas, one square below with four vast arches and colon- nades, the other a perfect circle, with a single continuous ring of columns, an unbroken over- arching hemisphere. The austerity of one, the richness of the other, glowing with bronze and gold, reflected the personalities of McKim and of White, here matched one against the other in friendly emulation. The domed church, of the type Mills had chosen for the evangelical sects, suggested itself again to White, when he had to build for the Presbyterians in Madison Square. His task was indeed discouraging. The site was surrounded by high commercial structures; on the opposite corner was soon to rise the highest building in the world. Any conventional church tower would have been trivial and ineffective. He chose a [179] Oe I ee oe eee 7 eos a et eg aaa: iy Oy oe ea i) . AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE solid cubical mass with a low dome, a colossal portico of polished granite, as overpowering by its vast scale as the neighboring structure was by its height. As always with White, the materials and textures were given a rich and masterly treatment. Lingering scruples long prevented the bodily imitation of the temple, but fruitful suggestions were found in other antique types, unregarded in earlier days. ‘The peristyle, completely sur- rounding the building, reappeared in John Russell Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite at Washington, a superb restudy of the motive of the ancient Mausoleum. The square mass rising above the broad simple terraces of approach, the colonnade with its perfect uniformity every way, the centralizing pyramid above, unite in an effect of overwhelming simplicity and grandeur. A design of unique brilliance, embodying in extreme form the classic ideal of unity, won for Guy Lowell the competition for the New York Court House. The site, an irregular polygon, the many similar court rooms required, made the problem one of great difficulty. Practical and artistic conditions alike were satisfied in the form [180] A Oe Sy: ~~ se coe een cae Sa ae nS ae ae Ferns ee Pais Lene ea oe Ne ee, ee SF Be ae ee gk, See, Pa ee ee ES ee arya -, Pes Te Tae OEE Ea eT mE ea vase i a ees a ey on >| - nt ee Hie a TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM conceived by Richmond, one of Lowell’s de- signers—a, perfect circle, with a ring of court- rooms, story above story, round a circular wait- ing hall. It was a type of mass which had not been adopted since the building of Hadrian’s great monument in Rome, of which the core sur- vives in the Castle of St. Angelo. The war inter- vened to delay the execution and increase the cost. Economy then dictated the abandonment of the circular form for a hexagonal one, still notable in its crystalline quality. A perfect realization of the classic ideal was reached in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The struggle which preceded its building showed that the conceptions of the artistic leaders had been firmly grasped by some of the controlling figures of public life. Against the other romantic sites proposed, it held its place of honor on the main axis. McKim had shown there an oblong temple-like peristyle, placed across the line of the vista, sheltering a colossal statue of the savior of the Union. This scheme was retained by Henry Bacon—one of McKim’s artistic heirs with a Greek sensitiveness and refinement all his own—who was entrusted with the work. A long [181] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE canal bordered with straight avenues was led from the obelisk to the foot of vast circular terraces which uphold the pedestal. A wall within the surrounding columns was raised above in a simple attic, carved with emblems of all the — states. Inside, facing the Capitol, from which one approaches, is the great brooding figure of Lincoln. On the walls of pillared recesses to left and right are graved the noble words of his two immortal utterances. There is nothing more, ex- cept the supreme distinction and peace of the architectural forms themselves, handled with love and refinement by an artist of quiet and choice spirit. There is no effort, other than in the statue, specifically to characterize the indi- vidual—the uncouthness of the rustic vanishes in the nobility of the man—his greatness in the life of the nation is marked by the dominance of the site, the grandeur of the scale. Along with these achievements in simplicity of mass went a renewed solicitude for form in in- _ terior space. The elementary geometrical shapes of sphere and cylinder were variously combined in vast vaulted halls. In the banks, the ex- changes, the railway-stations they symbolized the majesty of finance and of commerce. [182] osvoryg “ouoZT JO WANOD oY [—WIOY IVoIssvID a0 HaWwaAMy, AY, plousy ‘d ‘O fig eanvbany From “Manhattan, the Magical Island,” courtesy of Ben Judah Lubschez Tue Music oF SPACE The Pennsylvania waiting room, New York TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM The lofty waiting-room of the Pennsylvania Station in New York takes its suggestion from the fabrics of imperial Rome. The construction of steel is but a hidden means to achieve a grandiose scenic effect. The practical functions of the room, too, are insignificant. It is con- ceived, rather, in accordance with its higher, ideal function—as a civic vestibule to the world metropolis. In the soaring, musical spaces, the spirit of the newcomer is exalted, to evoke in him a new ambition, a new power. The immense terminal concourse of the Grand Central, with its multitudinous unceasing life, its sheer towering supports upholding the blue vault strewn with the signs of the heavens, is the image of the modern cosmos. In the design of tall buildings, Sullivan’s ex- pression of altitude by accenting the vertical lines long imposed itself, not only on the few who, like him, sought to abandon inherited forms, but on their antagonists. For a score of years it held undisputed sway in this, its first province. Even men who were content to choose here and there among the historic styles, gave at least lip source to “structural expression.” When Wool- [183] “AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE worth called on Cass Gilbert to surpass all other — buildings in height, he turned for precedent to the Gothic, with its soaring lines, and raised a cathedral of commerce. Even the most con- sistent devotees of abstract form and of classical balance did not remain untouched by these ex- amples. In their New York Municipal Build- ing, their first true skyscraper, McKim, Mead and White marked the lines of the steel columns by shallow vertical strips. Above, an arbitrary abstract form, a circular crown of columns, con- trasted with the structural expression below. Even the skyscraper, the very stronghold of the defenders of functional expression, was ulti- mately to be captured, at least for a moment, by the champions of form. Their victory came in the building of the Century Holding Company, the first of the “millionaire apartments’ built on Fifth Avenue shortly before the war. Here McKim and his associates no longer com- promised, but were true to their own implicit theory of form. The steel frame disappeared behind tall curtain walls of unbroken masonry, the merits of which lay in uniformity, rhythm and proportion. Almost simultaneously rose [184] TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM Platt’s Leader-News Building in Cleveland with its vast plane surfaces of grooved stone. To the vertical lines of Sullivan’s high buildings, _ identical with them in mass, they opposed hori- zontal belts and horizontal lines. To the sug- gestion of the serried trunks of the forest they opposed that of the sheer cliff of bedded stone, equally impressive in its loftiness. The multitude of high apartment buildings east of Central Park followed the new example with one accord. ‘The Federal Reserve Bank raised its vast precipices in the narrow canyons down-town. For better or for worse, the struggle to express the steel frame, so crucial in the nineties, became a dead issue. The effect of the new formalism was widely felt abroad. The French, who made fun of the colonnades at Chicago in 1893, recalled them in the Paris Exposition of 1900, so unlike all its European predecessors. The English, abandon- ing the traditions of Ruskin, became frank in admiration. The leaders of the new generation there, like Adshead, Richardson and Atkinson, came to know America well. With a stimulated appreciation of form they strove to base a new [185] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE development on their own fine classic architec- ture of 1800. Lutyens, at the height of his career, abandoned the medieval tradition and sought to assimilate the classic spirit. The theatric baroque of Wren, which had lived on in the “free classic” of Belcher and in the later work of Norman Shaw, tended to give way to a quieter and more tempered speech. When Harvey Corbett built Bush House in the Strand, the first great American work on English soil, the chorus of tongues in admiration of its boldness and simplicity showed how complete was the revolu- tion in English taste. In the British colonies — American influence was great: the architecture of Canada, Australia and New Zealand became predominantly American in its style. An urge — to simplicity and clarity of form made itself felt | all over the world. McKim and his associates were eager to 2 petuate their style by other means besides stone. With the eternal hope of elder generations, run- ning counter to the endless creative renewal of art, they labored to found institutions which should be the guardians of their established order. Ata great dinner in Washington McKim [186 ] j yIOK MIN ‘Aurduog ojeyng§ SulploH, Aanquod oy} 10F syustmyIedy BSurping (yeQuepnig) AjyuR1eny osyJ, WSINAAGOYY JO SATOd aH y, any M Pun pvay ‘wuzyory fo fsajunop | XS a! : a od bi “4 ? % LEN Pe ser te 7 twa ae sh eee Weren, \ § Seqcents nee Sites Weed eel VEE rue SE ge TE RE AE YT A Maa eS as & NEAR RN EROS bie. Oup Matrer1aAL AND New Form The W ght tomb, St. Louis . inri a TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM brought together the heads of state and church to establish and sanctify the supremacy of classic form. The Commission of Fine Arts was created to defend the plans for Washington; the American Academy in Rome to crown the edu- cation of youth; the American Academy of Art and Letters to recognize and dignify the elders. All seemed fair as the war interrupted for a moment the prodigious activity in building. [187] XIV COUNTER-CURRENTS CHAPTER XIV COUNTER-CURRENTS At THE height of the classical flood, Louis Sullivan, aged and defeated but still undaunted, refused to believe his ship had sunk but spoke of it as a submarine. It did, indeed, continue to move beneath the surface, borne on by an under- current. Sullivan still worked, although the great com- missions in the West fell increasingly to others, who adopted the reigning taste. The Wain- wright tomb, cubical and domed, with strong simple bands of characteristic ornament, gates and doors freshly imagined, is perhaps the most significant of his later designs. His little banks, conceived as an expression of the strong box, lack the magisterial conviction of the Wainwright Building. He found in them no vitally new problem, no new construction, to bear him up. When he had again to do with steel, in the Guaranty or Prudential Building in Buffalo, he [191] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE repeated the formule of the Wainwright Build- ing with little modification. Thus, in the phrase of his chief artistic heir, Sullivan remained essentially a man of one building. The spirit of freedom from historie precedent, or at least of freedom in using it, persisted to a certain degree in the work of many Chicago architects. Pond at Hull House and elsewhere, Perkins in his schools, Howard Shaw in his country houses, were but a few of those who strove for a new idiom. Some of their buildings, like Shaw’s Bartlett house at Lake Geneva, with its garden court, are of much beauty. Con- sciously or unconsciously, historical reminiscence still played a great réle in them. Neither in the elements nor in the dispositions were they funda- mentally and richly creative. A single figure of genius emerged in the gen- eration after Sullivan: Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan’s favorite helper, who had from the be- ginning the force to rise above imitation and discipleship. ‘Thoroughly grounded in engineer- ing, he had, not less than Sullivan, the soul of a lover and an artist. A reader of Goethe, he too was a worshiper of nature. [192] a ae oe ee ee et ee rn Me i Js Be ian ts Bi is COUNTER-CURRENTS His first work, the Winslow house, built in the year of the Chicago Fair, already shows elements of his mature style, developed in the houses of following years, with conscious adaptation to the wide horizons of the prairie. The plan is flexible, ramified, unsymmetrical, built up exclusively of rectangular elements, with each practical sub- division segregated, each wing, each room separately projected into the gardens and into the landscape. On the exterior, the effect is of repeatedly interrupted and again continued masses, of shifting planes, of severe horizontal- ism gained by rows of small windows closely beneath an immensely projecting, continuous roof of gentle slope. The wall is gathered into isolated piers. ‘The joints of the brickwork are deeply shadowed to accentuate still more the horizontal effect. Inside there is again the horizontal, in the low ceiling, the strong lines of its construction, the wide-stretched, heavy brick fireplace. Structural features, newly conceived, are everywhere emphasized, in the furnishings as well as in the building. Outside and in, the only decoration, often, is the living flower, in long stone troughs under the windows, in square bowls [193] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE on the terraces and gate piers, in vases "eG n- ually renewed. The style appears in its perfec- tion in the Coonley house and in Wright’s own place, Taliesin, twice destroyed by man and nature, twice rebuilt with unquenchable courage. | His writings, hymning nature and science, have emphasized the organic aspect of modern art as an outgrowth of changing practical problems, of new materials. From the begin- ning, he welcomed the machine as the tool of modernity, superseding the old handicraft. But a single industrial building has fallen to him, in which these ideas could find full expression—the Larkin Building in Buffalo, for the administra- tion of a great factory, set in a district laid waste by crass industrialism. There is an astonishingly apt conception of the problem in all its practical terms: the absence of outlook, the pollution of the outer air, the need of light, of inner super- vision and order, the desire to standardize and mechanize. The interior is treated as a single — cubical void, subdivided indeed by slender sup- ports for the storied galleries which look inward on a long central court. The windows to the outer day are high-silled and broad, Boks all [194] = = S ey Z, =) 4 < ee > 3 & aye Sf one Q 2 Courtesy of Fran The Larkin factory, Buffalo yavg yeo ‘aduiey Aug WUO, ASN GNV IVIUSLVI MIN uyosjpuary yoig fo fisajunog COUNTER-CURRENTS the width from pier to pier. They are not for view and air, but to let in the light of the sky. The building breathes through the top by vast ducts at the corners. The executives, seated in the midst among their staff, overlook the whole area. ‘The recurrent desks and files, lamps and dictaphones, make the sole adornment, except that from the upper gallery, devoted to refresh- ment, flowers look down. On the exterior the organization is one of mass. Every accessory element is used to make projection, and to create a three-dimensional effect. In the same way Wright has sought to analyze and to feel the characteristic ideal and practical requirements, as well as the novel structural aspects, of each problem he has attacked. “Archi- tecture,” he has said, “is the Idea of the thing— made to sing to heaven.” In his church, the Unity Temple at Oak Park, the cubical interior with its four equal arms with tiers and galleries, its staircases in the angles, gives rise to the out- wardly cubical articulated mass. The material, concrete, cast in temporary wooden molds, sug- gests the box-like form of the walls, the simple slab of the roofs. The whole building is a [195] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE monolith. The Imperial Hotel at Tokio is again a monolith of concrete, cast this time in perma- nent molds of brick and lava, with roofs and balconies overhanging on a cantilever principle. The ornament is of geometrical abstraction, not a leaf is carved, though living leaves grow every- where. Nature, so loved and studied by the de- signer, who foresaw her angry as well as her smiling moods, has respected his work. In the vast upheaval of the earth which engulfed the city, it alone survived. In spite of their conscious rationale, Wright, in all these works, has remained unconsciously the romantic artist. Their effort toward “ex- pression,” their exaggeration of the character- istic, binds them, in spite of the novelty of their forms, to the great romantic tradition. Romantic too are the reminiscences of older forms, from exotic cultures of the East, which still survive i his imagination and in his buildings. An independent initiative in the design of in- — dustrial buildings was taken by Ernest Wilby, associated with Albert Kahn of Detroit, not long after the Larkin Building. The adoption of reinforced concrete had spaced the piers of [196] COUNTER-CURRENTS factories more widely, without as yet affecting their conventional exterior design. Their small windows still limited the width of storied mills. In the building of the first great Ford plant at Highland Park, the idea came of filling the whole space from pier to pier with glass, held by steel sash of a new type, flooding the stories with daylight. In contrast with the old mill construc- tion the effect was strongly horizontal. The concrete frame could itself be exposed; the wall abandoned except for a low parapet below the window sills. Thus arose a new type of factory, expressive of the new construction. There were practical advantages: economy of material, greater effective width which could be ade- quately lighted. Almost overnight the scheme was adopted in thousands of American plants, and foreign imitation soon followed. The steel sash, strong enough to be self-sup- porting over large areas, soon came to have other applications. In foundries and power houses of a single high story, with traveling cranes sup- ported on steel, all the side of the great shed could now readily be made of glass, without any interruption by intermediate posts. ‘The whole [197] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE physiognomy of industrial buildings was quite changed. The brilliant beginning has, indeed, scarcely been followed up in America; Wilby himself felt that, with all the expressiveness, beauty had not been attained. The first schemes evolved by the architects were of such obvious availability that they were quickly seized on by engineers, who alone are consulted in most American industrial work, and applied as formule with little further artistic development. Wright’s direct followers in America have too often, as he has complained, taken the letter for the spirit. The idea of an “organic architecture” was not understood, but the forms in which he clothed it were ignorantly copied, cheapened and debased. About Chicago and through the West, his “Prairie style” in houses had descended, be- fore the war, even to the jerry-builder, eager only for a popular catch-word. Few of his pupils have had the strength to stand alone. Walter Burley Griffin, indeed, was victor in competition for the plan of Canberra, the capital of federal Australia, but his work in that far continent has scarcely risen above the horizon. [198] COUNTER-CURRENTS With Wright himself in exile, the movement he led came to a standstill in Chicago and America, its forces disintegrating. His voice, so little heeded in his own country, has meanwhile echoed around the world. It found foreign listeners prepared. ‘The same _ forces of life and thought which brought it forth in America, were beginning to call forth related expressions in the Europe of the “nineties. Soon after Sullivan’s pioneer achievement, Hankar and Horta in Belgium were laying the founda- tions for l'art nouveau, with its curved lines sug- gestive of plant forms, which flourished among the French craftsmen without at first greatly affecting architecture. It is in Germany that the rebellion against historical forms, the Secession, has had the widest success. In Vienna Otto Wagner demanded that “modern art must yield us modern ideas, forms created by us, which represent our abilities, our acts, and our preferences.” He, too, recog- nized and welcomed the advent of the machine. Peter Behrens in Berlin found a fertile field of experiment in the power houses and factories of modern industry. A new generation has sprung [199] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE up, since 1900, of men who no longer think in historic terms. “Organic,” the single word of praise which Albert Einstein gave Erich Men- delsohn, the architect of his unique laboratory, may stand as their watchword, as it was that of Sullivan, and is that of Wright. Taking their suggestion at first from science, the Ger- man designers have moved, since Cézanne’s revo- lution in painting, toward a more purely artistic unity of form. In Germany, in Scandinaeee in Holland, in the countries on the Slavic frontier, the name of Wright is one to conjure with. It was in Ger- many that his drawings were first sumptuously published; in Holland the leaders have united in a splendid tribute. On the other side of the world, the Japanese, after the earthquake, wanted him to take charge of the rebuilding of Tokio. At home his design for a skyscraper remains unbuilt. The influence of his ideas here is indirect. [200] a ag, eae aD” age a pe Pee te ee tes en ee ee a a ee a Sa ee a ee Sl v5 H A op) = fs no = ass H CHAPTER XV THE PRESENT Wir the close of the Great War, building, rudely but briefly interrupted, began anew, with even greater energy. Superficially all was much as before. The established order, the supremacy of classical form, continued, not without vitality for new growth. In the composition of mass in high buildings it has discovered a new field of achievement. Nevertheless, it is threatened with more than one danger, within and without. Chief of these is a certain loss of momentum. Like every other artistic cycle, it had its initial stimulus, its great leaders able by the freshness of their ideals to give new form to all they touched, its army of disciples, following out this or that path merely broken by their masters, its gradual subjugation of a whole territory. Some day must come when there are no new worlds to conquer. When a régime has become settled it is always its weaknesses which are obvious, and it [203] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE is then, not in the moment of victory, that they begin to tell. There is then a weakening of the first impetus, a fatigue of the adherents, who be- gin to drop away. Ultimately comes a moment when the eager spirit of youth is in open re- bellion. For the classic cycle in America such a time may be long hence—the conquest is too recent—but signs of inner exhaustion are not wanting. From the side of classicism most of the great problems of our time have been attacked and solved with such perfect conformity to its ideals that little room is left for further creative effort — in the same direction. In dealing with these problems the disciples of McKim are condemned to ring the changes on the models already estab- lished. These tend to harden into formule, sometimes relieved in their application by subtle sf restudy of proportion and detail. In the effort to vary them there is to-day a recrudescence of the old eclecticism, the choice of other languages and dialects of historic style. Generally these have been ones bordering on the classic—the suggestion, for instance, has been Byzantine or Romanesque, with a strong clas- [204] ae From “Manhattan, the Magical Island,” courtesy of Ben Judah Lubschez oa THe CATHEDRAL OF MamMon Woolworth Building, New York Tuer Arrow Bush Tower, New York THE PRESENT sical tinge. Renewed experiments have not been wanting, however, with the forms of styles more sharply distinct, like the Gothic. This experi- mental trend is clearly visible in the work of _ Harvey Corbett. He has striven to achieve new values within the classic tradition, as in his Springfield civic group of two isolated cubical masses with a campanile between, or in his Masonic memorial at Alexandria with its tall tower of receding columned stages. He has turned also to Gothic as in the arrow-like Bush tower, and to other, freer media, as in the tower at One Fifth Avenue. There is in this no at- tempt to change the basic ideals, but only the struggle for creative opportunity, on the part of an artist who has reaffirmed his faith in them by saying, “I have only one God: beauty of form.” This diversity has been emphasized by the individualism of religious sects, which has ex- tended from creeds to the church fabrics them- selves. Only in the newer cults, like Christian Science, has White’s initiative of a domed audito- rium of monumental classic form been widely adopted. The other Protestant sects have , [205] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE generally preferred to emphasize their early | establishment: the evangelical, by reversion to the Colonial; the Anglican by adherence to the Gothic. In the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the initial Romanesque scheme has later been revised into Gothic, which even Burnham was led to believe in for the style of the cathedral at Washington. Catholicism has found in the Roman basilica a reconciliation between its old traditions and the supremacy of classical form. In the building of houses, local tradition has been the most powerful force. In the original seaboard states, Colonial example has been ob- served more closely, and its provincial varieties have become the bases of diverse local develop- ments in New England, in the “Dutch Colonial” area around New York, in the ledge-stone region of Pennsylvania, in the Virginia Piedmont.’ In Louisiana, the unique style of the old buildings, with its French suggestions, has not been without influence. In New Mexico the primitive adobe construction has found notable application. Most conspicuous has been the following of Spanish suggestions, enriched with elements [206] THE PRESENT from other semitropic countries, in Florida and Southern California. In all these phases of in- herited classic style a great simplicity of charac- ter has been held in common. Counter to the overwhelming popular interest in antique Colonial “Americana,” there has been, nevertheless, an increasing tendency among architects to eschew the use of any pronounced historic forms, and to depend on the loving study of textures and on gifted individual craftsmen in the allied arts. In this vein, artists like Harrie Lindeberg, Lewis Albro and Arthur Meigs have achieved personal results of much quiet beauty. Proselytes more whole-souled in their conver- sion from adherence to precedent have not been wanting. The most distinguished was Bertram Goodhue. In his best years, when still in the prime of life, he abandoned Gothic and classic alike, and was struggling to find a new mode of expression. In the competition for the great war memorial in Kansas City he met a reformed classicist of similar tendencies, Van Buren Magonigle. Their designs had much in com- mon—vast blocklike masses with sculptural en- richment, colonnades reduced to lowest terms, in [207] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE which only the suggestion and the proportions were classical. In Goodhue’s, the chief element was a background for colossal sculptured figures, recalling somewhat the massive German monu- ments of the imperial period. Magonigle’s, now in course of execution, was the simpler and more impressive. A tall circular buttressed shaft, visible for leagues over the prairie, rises from an immense platform of masonry, flanked by two low cubical structures. The simplicity of motive, the contrast between upright and level on a vast scale, is of elemental power. For the capitol of Nebraska, Goodhue used a similar composition—a square tower of extreme height rising from the plain, in the midst of a vast square low mass, of the utmost architectural nudity. Four arms of a great cross rise slightly above the outer enclosing mass, and give the tower visual support. Although medieval reminiscences are everywhere, and the idea of the tower itself is a romantic conception, the classic spirit of symmetry and uniformity pre- vails in the treatment of surfaces and spaces. The fusion is not entirely complete. We may welcome the experiment, but we must recognize [208] THE PRESENT that the new hybrid still recalls somewhat too in- sistently its diverse origins. The same disinfected classicism prevails in Goodhue’s last work, the building of the Amer- ican Academy of Sciences in Washington. Downeast at first at the requirement of con- formity to the established character of the sur- roundings, he strove to vitalize the old formule by elimination of columnar elements, by refine- ment of profiling and restraint of sculptured ornament. In spite of its beauty of material and detail, the building suffers from the breaks in the simple rhythm of its facade. The forms but not the spirit of the classic are there. In these later works Goodhue’s achievement is more of a negative than a positive character. He has tried to expurgate without bringing much that is deeply creative. Beside such internal movements, a reflux from abroad is favoring the drift from the classic. Certain American artists have recognized the creative liberty secured by the Germans, and are trying to free themselves from the bondage of academic detail while preserving the American heritage of simplicity and unity of form. Thus [209 ] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE it is, for instance, with Clarence Zantzinger and Charles Borie of Philadelphia. In their earlier work on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the refinements of form and the splendors of color have shown that the purest classic may still have vitality. In their Fidelity Mutual Building, on the other hand, without the slightest effect of the bizarre which would betray an exotic element, the simple forms have freed themselves from the chilling hand of precedent. The irregular site has been handled brilliantly to produce an un- usual balanced composition. ‘The two immense arched portals contrast with the long ranges of simple piers. Rich sculpture and color and gild- ing enhance the effect. Another, impulse from abroad was given by the Paris exposition of decorative arts in 1925, where surviving elements of the art nowveau, which had remained in solution, were precipi- tated by reagents from Vienna. Under the intelligent fostering of Charles Richards, Amer- ican manufacturers were interested, and experi- ment with new forms has begun again in American interiors and furnishing. The recrudescence of. materialism which has fol- [210] THE PRESENT lowed the war has thrown the preponderance in American architecture on commercial structures and other buildings for investment. The un- paralleled abundance of public, monumental building in the preceding period is not ap- proached in the vastly greater total volume of construction to-day. The tall office building with steel frame is again in the center of interest. By itself this has given a new stimulus to fresh ad- venture. The direction which this has taken was power- fully affected by the provisions of the ordinance adopted in New York during the war to regulate the height of buildings. This law, while arbi- trarily limiting the general height of wall on the street line in different regions or zones of the city, allowed certain portions of the wall to ex- ceed this height, permitted walls to rise still higher in proportion as they were set back from the street, and placed no limitation of height on a tower which should occupy not more than one- quarter of the site. Some of these provisions recognized tendencies already evident. The ad- vantages of outlook and light had already led often to the abandonment of inner for outer [211] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE courts, deeply indenting the front, and modeling the upper part of long facades with comb-like teeth. In the race for height, with its advantages of réclame, it had already proved less costly to carry skyward but a part of the whole building. The Singer Tower, the Metropolitan Tower, and the Woolworth Tower, which had successively outrivaled all others, had given the suggestion. The other clauses of the law now encouraged further departures from the single cubical mass usual in the early office buildings. | In many structures of mere utility, the legal . provisions have been allowed to have their effect mechanically without the effort to fuse and recast the form in the creative spirit. Some of these raw novel products of law and economics, like the buildings of the Garment Center, with their vast bulk stepped in receding stories, already show elements of style, and achieve a new aspect. In the hands of the artistic leaders the crude masses have fallen into order. It is with the sculpturing of mass, hitherto always possible but little regarded in the higher buildings, that they are now concerned. Surface and detail have be- come less significant. The towers thrust them- [212] THE PRESENT selves upward, bastioned all about. In their grouping there is an infinitude of possibilities. It matters little whether every foot of cubic space within the legal “envelope” is filled. Volume for volume desired, the steel frame may as easily be high as broad. The air above is free to enclose. Already these varied opportunities are being avidly seized. Among the new works daily tak- ing form are certain masterly creations. In the Shelton Hotel, the work of Arthur Loomis Harmon, the tower stands broadside to the street. From the front, the building seems not merely to have a tower, but to be atower. In three great leaps of rhythmic height it rises, gathering in its forces for the final flight. The vertical files of rooms, alternately projected, leave shallow recesses, making tall upright lines which continue uninterrupted into the silhouette against the sky. At the top, the great windows of the pool terminate the uniform underlying pattern of the small openings below. Faint touches of Italian Romanesque detail are in- significant in the essential freshness of concep- tion. In the great office building, broader and lower, [213] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE built by Ely Jacques Kahn at the foot of Park Avenue, there are only three simple masses, three diminishing cubes, the upper ones distinguished by broad use of color. The staged tower of the Babylonians comes again to life. Here and in the Shelton all is rectangular, cubical. In the Fraternity Clubs, solids of other forms appear, octagonal and circular. The use of masses other than the cubical had already been suggested in the crowns of the Municipal and Bush Towers; now the enrichment of form is carried into the outer supporting blocks. Tht Ritz Tower shoots upward like a slender arrow. On one of the most valuable sites in the world, its area has been voluntarily contracted immediately above the ground stories, with a preference for going high rather than spreading out. It is such works that have emboldened ~ imagination to conceive a city with lance-like towers set in open plots of greenery. Such an extreme will doubtless never be attained, but it - augurs that many new visions still lie hidden in the future. ere Although the modeling of masses has thus absorbed the chief interest, the surfaces remain [214] Phetograph by Wurts Brothers Masses Hotel Shelton, New York # oR } ate A AES AANRAAEERO REE. AT tN Bie BURT +, Courtesy of Raymond M. Hood Mass AND LINE The American Radiator Building, New York THE PRESENT and must have their treatment. Of late there is a tendency to abandon the plane enveloping curtain of McKim, and again to energize the effect with aspiring lines. Raymond Hood led the way in this with his American Radiator Building, which embodies also so many other tendencies of the time: the early contraction of the tower to permit windows all about, the solicitude for variety of mass evident in the octagonal suggestion of the beveled corners and in the complex stepping of the upper stages, the interest in color. The black piers leap upward, tipped with gold, the golden crown blazes in the level sun and gleams afar at night. When the Chicago Tribune set a great prize for the design which should surpass all others, projects came from every country. Vertical emphasis predominated. Hood and Howells, adjudged the winners, in repeating and varying the motive of the Radiator Building, took a step backward by closely following the details of Gothic. The second prize fell to a Finn, Eliel Saarinen, who, for his square tower with simple receding bastions, evolved a ribbed mantle of striking originality. Sullivan hailed it, in his [215] AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE dying breath, as a Phoenix from the ashes of his old hopes. The artist has found little oppor- tunity to realize his poetic dream, although plagiarists have been quick to turn it into prose. Meanwhile other inspired works have been ris- ing. The vast bulk of the Telephone Building looms on New York’s water-front. The archi- tects, McKenzie, Voorhees and Gmelin, have given their designer, Ralph Walker, free play. Here, as in Corbett’s studies, is an effort to fill the maximum legal mass, subject to the require- ments of light and the suggestions of steel con- struction. A multitude of cubical steppings and recessings make the transition from the block be- low to the vast square tower with its receding summit. ‘Trivial reminiscences of the Gothic have fallen away; puerile suggestions of historic style no longer mar the interior. As in the best German work, all is smelted anew in the creative spirit. It is in these buildings, particularly in the Shelton, that we see the larger unity of American modernism, toward the poles of which—func- tional expressiveness and abstract form—its masters have variously striven. In Sullivan’s [216] THE PRESENT quest of expression he did not lose simplicity of mass. His tall buildings are crystalline, cast in one jet, like those of McKim and Platt. In spite of the difference of their superficial markings, vertical or horizontal, they are essentially at one. So too, in the upbuilding of the new colossi of steel we see the balanced and centralized mode which McKim had brought again to honor in low buildings of masonry. Scarcely one of the new giants has a corner tower, not one has the romantic, unbalanced massing which was uni- versal in the day of Richardson, and which might equally—but for the power of the new classic tradition—have ruled to-day. In all the welter of experiment, the basic character of our modern work—its measured simplicity and_ breadth, above all,its clarity—has remained in common. [217] - ra Z » AA NY ANN UK \ ERS SS \ WY SSR x RESERV . LAX MK QAG SS SAAN EAN ~ » . LENS Ah Sh . . SO ah) . SNORE ‘ AN ww Saks RN RQ ea NY ‘ . SSNS EAN ‘ . S \ So ‘ AS *S \\ ‘ YS . SS . Ne . . ‘ ANS SY . > AORN \ Tere ketae AS NS . . S NS 5 \\ x \ AX \\ SS ANS \ SAMY oe