Volume 148

February 15, 1928

Number 7

T

HE editor of The Outlook has placed in my hand two books on architecture to be used as the text of any sermon I may choose to preach on the subject. These books are "The Story of Architecture in America," by Thomas E. Tallmadge, and "Towards a New Architecture," by Le Corbusier, translated by Frederick Etchells.

Mr. Tallmadge's book is, as is claimed for it, the first full-length survey of building in America from A to Z-from Architecture as an Art, to the Ziegfeld Theatre, in point of fact. So far from being pedantic or pedagogic, it is written in an expansive and enthusiastic vein which is refreshing, though now and then suggesting the Rotary Club luncheon chairman introducing crutch-tippers, round-moth-ball manufacturers, and window dressers as men "whom posterity will not willingly forget." Mr. Tallmadge's propensity for seeing in every flower a rose and in every goose a swan, his neglect of social and psychological factors, and that kind of catholicity of taste which makes him sometimes run with the hare and hunt with the hounds prevent his book from being important from the standpoint of criticism, but conspire, nevertheless, to its success as a survey, a history, a book of reference, because these qualities insure a balance, a fullness, san bias, and a fairness which any par

bias would automatically destroy. This was for him not hack writing, as such books so often are, but a labor of ove. It was a thing well worth doing, and is, in the main, well done.

By CLAUDE BRAGDON

sense of form finds more food for its admirations in modern works of engineering, airplanes, and motor cars than in the turbid products of architectural romanticists for we may be sure that a Greek would look with amazement and admiration on our locomotives, liners, tunnels, and bridges, and with nothing but contempt on our pillared and pedimented court-houses and capitols. The epigrammatic aphorisms which form the book's bony structure, as it were, are admirable; and some of them should be emblazoned in letters of gold on the walls of architectural colleges-such as, "Passion can create drama out of inert stone," for example; but when Le Corbusier essays the application of his formulas to architecture and city planning the same thing happens that happens in reading in the second volume of Violletle-Duc's "Discourses:" one just cannot imagine one's self being happy living in cities and houses such as these. His

chapter, "Regulating Lines," is a valuable contribution to a subject which is assuming constantly increasing importance the felt but invisible mathematical basis of all good design; and his commentaries on the Parthenon—well, these are what reveal him as a reincarnated Greek.

Now these two books, coming at this

time, indicate, first, a growing awareness on the part of the general public to architecture as an art; and, second, a new direction which that art appears to be about to take. The first conclusion is borne out by the fact that such a popular sheet as the "New Yorker" reviews buildings just as it reviews plays and books; that swank and swagger "Vanity Fair" intersperses

Le Corbusier's book belongs to an altogether different dimension; it is sulphitic, as the other is bromidic, the product, one would say, of a reincarated Periclean Greek, whose cold logic, ear intelligence, and mathematical photographs of new and notable build

ings among the faces of the Famous and the Fair; and that the "New Republic" not infrequently prints architectural essays from the pen of the author of "Sticks and Stones," the most sound and searching book on the architectural aspect of the American scene-notwithstanding Mr. Mumford's evident and avowed bias-which has yet been produced.

The second conclusion-that Our architecture is seeking new forms of expression is sufficiently attested by the quite disproportionate amount of interest and excitement, both professional and lay, aroused by such buildings as the New York Telephone Building, the Nebraska State Capitol, and Eliel Saarinen's unsuccessful yet triumphant competitive design for the Chicago Tribune Building, all of them embodying marked departures from traditional forms and a striving for some new synthesis. Under these circumstances, it may not be amiss to try to plot the curve our architecture has taken and is taking, and to draw such conclusions as our survey seems to suggest.

The architecture of our earliest colonial period was a product of nature rather than of art; born of the simple and austere necessities of Puritans and pioneers, using such materials as were nearest to hand, the houses had that kind of inevitable structural beauty, that perfect adaptation of means to ends, which belongs to the bird's nest and the beaver's dam. It was only when America became somewhat settled and prosperous, was in active and constant communication with the mother country, and the "mansion" began to supplant the weather-boarded and shingled cottage, that what we now know as the Colonial style arose. This was an off

shoot of the contemporary Georgian architecture in England, but in transplanting it underwent modifications due both to physical and psychological causes. Its chief difference from the Georgian dwelt in a kind of attenuation -columns were slenderer, moldings finer; it became less robust, but, at its best, more elegant. In New York State the Dutch influence crept in, as in Louisiana the French. The piazza, particularly throughout the South, took on a new importance and impressiveness. But these modifications were as of the same plant, adjusting itself to different soils and climates, and the style possessed a consistency, a coherency, a beauty, an appropriateness, which makes the period of its prevalence our brightest architectural era. It was our own, and lent itself easily to all our uses.

The Colonial was succeeded, early in the nineteenth century, by the so-called Classic Revival, which was an outgrowth of the then current enthusiasm for classical antiquity, and took the form of an attempt to reproduce the characteristic features of the architecture of Greece and Rome according to the somewhat erroneous notions of the day-in stone preferably, but, lacking that, in stucco or matched boards. It was bombastic, false, and even a little silly, but, nevertheless, houses that we all remember, with high, white-pillared porticoes flanked by low wings, back from the highroad and atop a rising, tree-planted sward, are charming souvenirs of that

pseudo-classic contagion, and eloquently rebuke "the fatness of these pursey times."

The architecture of our post-Civil War or reconstruction period-that "dim, Victorian limbo"-was perhaps as bad as anything the world has ever seen. A great deal of it still survives, even in a city which recreates itself as rapidly as does New York. The Seventy-second Street esplanade and steps, above the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, the Post Office fronting City Hall Park, and Tammany Hall are perfect specimens of the Boss Tweed era. Witness also the lobby of the Murray Hill Hotel, which came a little later, in its day the very

last word for elegance; and uptown one may still see entire blocks of brownstone fronts which gaze with glazed eyes across mean streets at exact replicas of themselves. The Ruskinian Gothic revival was represented in the old Academy of Design, on Twenty-third Street, built at about the time the first marble palaces made their appearance on Fifth Avenue. But it was not until the advent of Richardson that the general public realized that there was such an art in the world as architecture, or such a creature as an architect.

Richardson's romantically picturesque Trinity Church, in Boston, captivating the popular fancy like nothing else before or since, inaugurated what is known as "Richardsonian Romanesque," but its vogue was short-lived, being foreign to our psychology and ill adjusted to our needs. It was stage scenery, in point of fact, and only a little after the death of its great exemplar the show closed and the scenery went back to the storehouse.

How shall I fittingly designate the next new departure? False Dawn, I think I shall have to call it-the brief interregnum of distinguished individual artists such as Louis Sullivan, Harvey Ellis, Wilson Eyre, Frank Miles Day, and Stanford White (before he became a mere assembler of the spoils of Europe), with La Farge, Saint-Gaudens and Louis Tiffany as aids and allies These men inaugurated a renaissance of rare and various beauty, but so soon and so completely overwhelmed by the

Underwood & Underwood

steam-roller of imperial industrialism that few vestiges of it survive, the deli

cate house façades of Babb, Cook and Willard, and of McKim, Mead and GWhite having long since been replaced

by big bedizened skyscrapers. According to the inexorable law that architecture must express the consciousness behind it, the architecture of self-effacement and refinement had to give place to the architecture of self-assertion and power. But, reader, if you would have the evidence of your own eyes, consider the Farragut statue in Madison Square, the joint product of Saint-Gaudens and White. That simple slate-colored exedra, polished now by nearly a generation of lounging backs, littered, and soiled by playing children's hands, is the blasted bud of an art that never blossomed. Is it symbolical that the creator of this original little masterpiece was murdered by a young millionaire in an affair about a woman? Had he been tied to the golden chariot-wheels too long?

and by the sheer force of its altitude shouts, "What a great boy am I!"

This movement was extinguished by the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, in which the architecture of imperialism announced itself. This has increasingly prevailed ever since, so that our public buildings bear, as a matter of course, the stamp of that ancient Rome which, as Ferrero has pointed out, is so close, economically and psychologically, to modern America. But though it is all very well for an intrenched and triumphant imperialism to spend thousands of perfectly useless dollars on classic columns and carved cornices to decorate the façades of their capitols, courthouses, post offices, and banks, the individual investor, intent on the absolute most for his money, is all for efficiency and economy. In the buildings under his immediate jurisdiction, therefore, particularly in skyscraper architecture, so called, column and cornice go increasingly into the discard, to the advantage, not only of the pocketbook, but of the optic nerve. The bones of these buildings are beautiful and their stark geometry needs no veneer of constructed architectural ornament. engineering skill and economic necessity, Impelled by skyscraper architecture in America now appears to be on its way to something true and something new. Let banks be Grecian temples and railway stations Roman baths, let libraries and museums, clad in immaculate marble, at ease on their esplanades, arch their eyebrows as they may, the skyscraper, for good or ill, increasingly rears its arrogant head above the murmur of the market-place,

February 15, 1928

And why is it such a great boygreater than anything else architectural that America has produced? Because it is the outgrowth of a new necessity, which had to be met in a new way. The science of engineering, not the art of architecture, produced the skyscraper, and in architecture we follow in the footsteps of Europe, but in engineering we lead the world. Forced to depend upon ourselves for our salvation, salvation is at last in sight.

A

ND here I reach the point which I am trying to enforce: namely, that with few exceptions the "triumphs" of American architecture are the triumphs of American engineering; that the architect, so far from seeking a new dramatic expression for new building materials and unprecedented structural methods, has been (with a few notable and honorable exceptions) a reactionary, forced

along the path he needs must travel by the pressure of economic and structural necessity, instead of pressing boldly forward in an effort to develop an architecture which is indigenous and new, as is demanded by our unprecedented problems and our modern outlook and point of view.

To prove this contention must I quote chapter and verse? Very well then: Richardson was a reactionary when he built a modern auditorium church in the semblance of the Cathedral of Salamanca; White was a reactionary when he "lifted" the Palazzo Vendramini from the lagoons of the Adriatic and planted it on Fifth Avenue; also McKim, when he made the warm room of the Imperial Baths of Caracalla into a railway waiting-room; Le Brun was a reactionary when he punched the Campanile of San Marco full of holes, planted an illuminated clock in its stomach, and called it the Metropolitan Tower; so also Bacon, with his Greek Doric Lincoln Memorial;

and even Cass Gilbert-I say it reluctantly and with trepidation, for the Woolworth Tower affects one like a strain of beautiful music-when he frittered up its fair and exultant façade with Gothic ornament. Why Gothic

ornament?

But why extend this list? Why insist on the obvious that in looking back the architect is in danger of crystallization, may turn, like Lot's wife, to a pillar of salt? He is usually a reconstructive archæologist in difficulties, of foreign extraction and only partially extracted, believing that all the good songs have been sung and all the true words spoken, and that

Art stopped short

In the cultivated court

Of the Empress Josephine,

because no American architect except Sullivan has invented a form, feature, or ornament which post-dates the Empire of the first Napoleon.

N

ow what is the reason for all thisfor these are good men and true, however misguiding and misguided? The answer is: The tyranny of Europe and the past over their imaginations, as fostered by the false education to which they have been subjected. Sullivan alone seems to have survived it, but he paled his ineffectual fires in the rising sun of Burnham and Company, who so much more fully shared, and better understood, the captain-of-industry psychology. The engineer, forced to abandon all aid and comfort from the Old World and the past by reason of the newness of his material (steel) and the novelty of his problems, and therefore subject to no educational malpractice, has succeeded where the architect, taught only to lie and to steal, has failed. All that we can truly and unreservedly admire in American commercial architecture is its inspired engineering—and to the degree to which the architect has had a hand in that he is worthy of all praise. Those vast parallelopipedons of brick, those sky-piercing peopled obelisks and towers, those marble-lined, lighted catacombs-everything, in point of fact, that in terms of three-dimensional inclosure ministers to our modernity-we owe more to the engineer than to the architect.

Regret has been expressed in certain quarters that the new Holland Vehicular Tunnel unde: the Hudson is without any architectural expression or embellish

ment whatsoever-its entrance a mere hole in the wall. This on the face of it is ridiculous, yet I, for one, am reconciled, because that entrance would in all probability be given the form of a Roman triumphal arch, flanked by two Corinthian columns, or perhaps fouror peradventure six-and I am sick unto death of Corinthian columns. The other day I visited the architectural department of an eminent university, and what did I find? Lusty young undergraduates bent over drawing-boards engaged in flanking "An Entrance to a Garage" with Corinthian columns. I made the remark, "They ought to burn all the books in your architectural library, and then you couldn't do a thing so gauche as that!" But one young meanie hazarded the question, "Your own among them?" A hit, a very palpable hit!

Let it not be thought that I subscribe to the heterodoxy embodied in a remark made by a well-known captain of industry: "Engineering is all that there is to architecture, anyway." No! a thousand times no! The engineer, as a rule, knows nothing and cares less for those very spatial rhythms, co-ordinations, correspondences, which by a curious. paradox his own mathematics are always leading him toward and pointing out. Nor does he know anything of those eloquent juxtapositions of forms and colors, those revelations of the qualities of different materials, and of the quality of sunlight itself, in the recognition of which architecture constitutes itself as a "fine" art. Engineering is the raw drama, and the architect is the skilled dramatist; his work is to dramatize the engineering, to tell what the building is doing, what it is for, and what it is about. And if he be a good architect he will do this with a skill and eloquence of which the engineer, however accomplished, will be utterly incapable. No, the trouble with the architect is that he is trying to tell another and a different

B

UT to reform the architect will not insure a beautiful architecture, unfortunately, because at best the architect is only a medium through which the more diffused consciousness of the people manifests. So if a skyscraper be only a place for the transaction of sharp bargains, it will show itself, not as a "Cathedral of Commerce," but as a monster of the mere market, whether done well or ill. And if a bank be a devourer of widows' houses, though it be made in the semblance of a temple or a church, it will have a cutpurse look about it nevertheless. A house only looks like a home if it is one, and a prison will have the look and feel of a prison, done in whatever style one will.

No, God is not mocked, and least of all when man most mocks him; theft never enriches, alms never impoverish. the liar never can conceal the truth. This is what reconciles me to all our architectural atrocities; from them we may learn the truth about ourselves. For there is a perfect correspondence between the symbol and the thing signified; the measure of the difference between colonial days and these days is just the difference between the "onehoss shay" and the automobile, and if the insane speed of our industrial productiveness destroys human values, the insane speed of our automobiles will continue to destroy human lives. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at the expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and their sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, of the will-to-power of a man or a group of men-of that ruthless and tireless aggression on the part of the cunning and the strong. One of our streets, made up of buildings of diverse styles and shapes and sizes-like a jaw with some teeth whole, some broken, some rotten, and some gone-is a symbol of our unkempt and irresponsible individualism.

HAT we need is a new consciousness, and a new architecture will follow "as the night the day." A biologist told me once that the form was created by, and followed the function. and that before the heart appears in the human embryo there is a palpitation where the heart is going to be. So let us give over all this battle of styles, and I, for one, am even willing to unsay everything that I have ever said, if only we can start that palpitation in the place where we want beauty to grow up.