ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY
BY
CLAUDE BRAGDON
F.A.I.A.
1918
[Illustration: PLATE I. THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING, NEW YORK]
PREFACE
This book can lay no claim to unity of theme, since its subjects range
from skyscrapers to symbols and soul states; but the author claims for
it nevertheless a unity of point of view, and one (correct or not) so
comprehensive as to include in one synthesis every subject dealt
with. For according to that point of view, a skyscraper is only a
symbol--and of what? A condition of consciousness, that is, a state of
the soul. Democracy even, we are beginning to discover, is a condition
of consciousness too.
Our only hope of understanding the welter of life in which we are
immersed, as in a swift and muddy river, is in ascending as near
to its pure source as we can. That source is in consciousness and
consciousness is in ourselves. This is the point of view from which
each problem dealt with has been attacked; but lest the author be at
once set down as an impracticable dreamer, dwelling aloof in an ivory
tower, the reader should know that his book has been written in
the scant intervals afforded by the practice of the profession of
architecture, so broadened as to include the study of abstract form,
the creation of ornament, experiments with color and light, and such
occasional educational activities as from time to time he has been
called upon to perform at one or another architectural school.
The three essays included under the general heading of "Democracy
and Architecture" were prepared at the request of the editor of _The
Architectural Record_, and were published in that journal. The two
following, on "Ornament from Mathematics," represent a recasting and
a rewriting of articles which have appeared in _The Architectural
Review, The Architectural Forum_, and _The American Architect_.
"Harnessing the Rainbow" is an address delivered before the Ad. Club
of Cleveland, and the Rochester Rotary Club, and afterwards made into
an essay and published in _The American Architect_ under a different
title. The appreciation of Louis Sullivan as a writer appears here for
the first time, the author having previously paid his respects to Mr.
Sullivan's strictly architectural genius in an essay in _House and
Garden_. "Color and Ceramics" was delivered on the occasion of the
dedication of the Ceramic Building of the University of Illinois,
and afterwards published in _The Architectural Forum_. "Symbols and
Sacraments" was printed in the English Quarterly _Orpheus_. "Self
Education" was delivered before the Boston Architectural Club, and
afterwards published in a number of architectural journals.
Acknowledgment is hereby tendered by the author to the editors of
these various magazines for their consent to republication, together
with thanks, however belated, for their unfailing hospitality to the
children of his brain.
CLAUDE BRAGDON.
_August 1, 1918_.
CONTENTS
ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY
I. Before the War
II. During the War
III. After the War
ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS
I. The World Order
II. The Fourth Dimension
HARNESSING THE RAINBOW
LOUIS SULLIVAN, PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY
COLOR AND CERAMICS
SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS
SELF-EDUCATION
LIST OF FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate I. The Woolworth Building, New York
Plate II. The New York Public Library
Plate III. The Prudential Building, Buffalo, N.Y.
Plate IV. The Erie County Savings Bank, Buffalo, N.Y.
Plate V. The New York Central Terminal
Plate VI. Plan of the Red Cross Community Club House,
Camp Sherman, Ohio
Plate VII. Interior View of the Camp Sherman Community House
Plate VIII. Imaginative Sketch by Henry P. Kirby
Plate IX. Architectural Sketch by Otto Rieth
Plate X. 200 West 57th Street, New York
Plate XI. Imaginary Composition: The Portal
Plate XII. Imaginary Composition: The Balcony
Plate XIII. Imaginary Composition: The Audience Chamber
Plate XIV. Song and Light: An Approach toward "Color Music"
Plate XV. Symbol of Resurrection
Every form of government, every social institution, every
undertaking, however great, however small, every symbol of
enlightenment or degradation, each and all have sprung and are still
springing from the life of the people, and have ever formed and are
now as surely forming images of their thought. Slowly by centuries,
generations, years, days, hours, the thought of the people has
changed; so with precision have their acts responsively changed; thus
thoughts and acts have flowed and are flowing ever onward, unceasingly
onward, involved within the impelling power of Life. Throughout this
stream of human life, and thought, and activity, men have ever felt
the need to build; and from the need arose the power to build. So,
as they thought, they built; for, strange as it may seem, they could
build in no other way. As they built, they made, used, and left behind
them records of their thinking. Then, as through the years new men
came with changed thoughts, so arose new buildings in consonance
with the change of thought--the building always the expression of
the thinking. Whatever the character of the thinking, just so was the
character of the building.
What is Architecture? A Study in the American People of Today, by
LOUIS SULLIVAN.
Architecture and Democracy
I
BEFORE THE WAR
The world war represents not the triumph, but the birth of democracy.
The true ideal of democracy--the rule of a people by the _demos_, or
group soul--is a thing unrealized. How then is it possible to consider
or discuss an architecture of democracy--the shadow of a shade? It is
not possible to do so with any degree of finality, but by an intention
of consciousness upon this juxtaposition of ideas--architecture and
democracy--signs of the times may yield new meanings, relations may
emerge between things apparently unrelated, and the future, always
existent in every present moment, may be evoked by that strange magic
which resides in the human mind.
Architecture, at its worst as at its best, reflects always a true
image of the thing that produced it; a building is revealing even
though it is false, just as the face of a liar tells the thing
his words endeavor to conceal. This being so, let us make such
architecture as is ours declare to us our true estate.
The architecture of the United States, from the period of the Civil
War, up to the beginning of the present crisis, everywhere reflects a
struggle to be free of a vicious and depraved form of feudalism,
grown strong under the very ægis of democracy. The qualities that made
feudalism endeared and enduring; qualities written in beauty on
the cathedral cities of mediaeval Europe--faith, worship,
loyalty, magnanimity--were either vanished or banished from this
pseudo-democratic, aridly scientific feudalism, leaving an inheritance
of strife and tyranny--a strife grown mean, a tyranny grown prudent,
but full of sinister power the weight of which we have by no means
ceased to feel.
Power, strangely mingled with timidity; ingenuity, frequently
misdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty--these
in general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; an
architecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity," an architecture
devoid of coherence or conviction; willing to lie, willing to steal.
What impression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might have made
upon some denizen of those cathedral-crowned feudal cities of the
past we do not know. He would certainly have been amazed at its giant
energy, and probably revolted at its grimy dreariness. We are wont
to pity the mediaeval man for the dirt he lived in, even while smoke
greys our sky and dirt permeates the very air we breathe: we think of
castles as grim and cathedrals as dim, but they were beautiful and gay
with color compared with the grim, dim canyons of our city streets.
Lafcadio Hearn, in _A Conservative_, has sketched for us, with a
sympathy truly clairvoyant, the impression made by the cities of the
West upon the consciousness of a young Japanese samurai educated under
a feudalism not unlike that of the Middle Ages, wherein was worship,
reverence, poetry, loyalty--however strangely compounded with the more
sinister products of the feudal state.
Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him,--a
world of giants; and that which depresses even the boldest
Occidental who finds himself, without means or friends, alone
in a great city, must often have depressed the Oriental exile:
that vague uneasiness aroused by the sense of being invisible
to hurrying millions; by the ceaseless roar of traffic
drowning voices; by monstrosities of architecture without a
soul; by the dynamic display of wealth forcing mind and
hand, as mere cheap machinery, to the uttermost limits of
the possible. Perhaps he saw such cities as Doré saw London:
sullen majesty of arched glooms, and granite deeps opening
into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains
of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and
monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power
slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing
to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone
which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the
wind.
The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sure
to be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately for
us all this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. The
buildings are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, they
cannot run away. Like criminals "caught with the goods" they stand,
self-convicted, dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy with
the spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and greed stare at us out
of their glazed windows--eyes behind which no soul can be discerned.
There are doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean,
they want to be honest, these "monsters of the mere market," but they
are nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in our
transitional social state.
Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, to
extinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms of
life. They are big, powerful, "necessitous," and have therefore an
impressiveness, even an æsthetic appeal, not to be denied. So subtle
and sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget
was set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of a
trip-hammer, and to the following tune:
The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed
beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look
like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and
pouring forth a stream of people. You lift your eyes, and you
feel that up there behind the perpendicular wall, with
its innumerable windows, is a multitude coming and
going,--crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of
brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators.
You divine, you feel the hot breath of speculation quivering
behind these windows. This it is which has fecundated these
thousands of square feet of earth, in order that from them may
spring up this appalling growth of business palaces, that hide
the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day.
"The simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principle of
beauty," says M. Bourget, and to these structures this order of beauty
cannot be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to press the
advantage home: the ornate façades are notably less impressive
than those whose grim and stark geometry is unmitigated by the
grave-clothes of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings toward
a beauty that is fresh and living, but they are so unsuccessful and
infrequent as to be negligible. However impressive these buildings may
be by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight and magnitude,
and as a manifestation of irrepressible power, they have the
unloveliness of things ignoble being the product neither of praise,
nor joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction of sharp
bargains--gold bringing jinn of our modern Aladdins, who love them not
but only use them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has loved
them for themselves alone.
For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture of
a true democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty would
inevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment in
our social and economic life. 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 so
characteristic of the period which produced the skyscraper. 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 individualism, now happily
becoming curbed and chastened by a common danger, a common devotion.
Some people hold the view that our insensitiveness to formal beauty is
no disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests are
in other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of older
civilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered in
terms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. It
is because the achievements of older civilizations attained to their
apotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are able
to effect a corresponding transmutation we are destined to perish
unhonoured on our rubbish heap. That we shall effect it, through
knowledge and suffering, is certain, but before attempting the
more genial and rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in our
architecture, those forces and powers which make for righteousness,
for beauty, let us look our failures squarely in the face, and
discover if we can why they are failures.
Confining this examination to the particular matter under discussion,
the neo-feudal architecture of our city streets, we find it to lack
unity, and the reason for this lack of unity dwells in a _divided
consciousness_. The tall office building is the product of many
forces, or perhaps we should say one force, that of necessity; but its
concrete embodiment is the result of two different orders of talent,
that of the structural engineer and of the architectural designer.
These are usually incarnate in two different individuals, working
more or less at cross purposes. It is the business of the engineer
to preoccupy himself solely with ideas of efficiency and economy,
and over his efficient and economical structure the designer smears
a frosting of beauty in the form of architectural style, in the
archæological sense. This is a foolish practice, and cannot but result
in failure. In the case of a Greek temple or a mediaeval cathedral
structure and style were not twain, but one; the structure determined
the style, the style expressed the structure; but with us so divorced
have the two things become that in a case known to the author, the
structural framework of a great office building was determined and
fabricated and then architects were invited to "submit designs"
for the exterior. This is of course an extreme example and does not
represent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousness
the well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially one
method of construction--that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal
"fill"--while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance,
Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of the
designer.
[Illustration: PLATE II. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY]
With the modern tendency toward specialization, the natural outgrowth
of necessity, there is no inherent reason why the bones of a building
should not be devised by one man and its fleshly clothing by another,
so long as they understand one another, and are in ideal agreement,
but there is in general all too little understanding, and a
confusion of ideas and aims. To the average structural engineer the
architectural designer is a mere milliner in stone, informed in those
prevailing architectural fashions of which he himself knows little and
cares less. Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety,
economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with address
and daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters as
the stylistic purity of a façade, or the profile of a moulding. To the
designer, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of a
subordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evil
to be endured as an interference with those ends.
As a result of this lack of sympathy and co-ordination, success crowns
only those efforts in which, on the one hand, the stylist has been
completely subordinated to engineering necessity, as in the case of
the East River bridges, where the architect was called upon only to
add a final grace to the strictly structural towers; or on the other
hand, in which the structure is of the old-fashioned masonry sort, and
faced with a familiar problem the architect has found it easy to be
frank; as in the case of the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, on 42nd
Street, New York, or in the Bryant Park façade on the New York
Library. The Woolworth building is a notable example of the complete
co-ordination between the structural framework and its envelope, and
falls short of ideal success only in the employment of an archaic and
alien ornamental language, used, however, let it be said, with a fine
understanding of the function of ornament.
For the most part though, there is a difference of intention between
the engineer and the designer; they look two ways, and the result of
their collaboration is a flat and confused image of the thing that
should be, not such as is produced by truly binocular vision. This
difference of aim is largely the result of a difference of education.
Engineering science of the sort which the use of steel has required is
a thing unprecedented; the engineer cannot hark back to the past for
help, even if he would. The case is different with the architectural
designer; he is taught that all of the best songs have been sung, all
of the true words spoken. The Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur
that was Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the ordered
restraint of Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years of
training, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that
he loses the power of clear and logical thought, and never becomes
truly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded in
being straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to it
the man with a so-called architectural education is too often tortuous
and absurd.
The architect without any training in the essentials of design
produces horrors as a matter of course, for the reason that sin is the
result of ignorance; the architect trained in the false manner of the
current schools becomes a reconstructive archæologist, handicapped by
conditions with which he can deal only imperfectly, and imperfectly
control. Once in a blue moon a man arises who, with all the advantages
inherent in education, pierces through the past to the present, and
is able to use his brain as the architects of the past used theirs--to
deal simply and directly with his immediate problem.
Such a man is Louis Sullivan, though it must be admitted that not
always has he achieved success. That success was so marked, however,
in his treatment of the problem of the tall building, and exercised
subconsciously such a spell upon the minds even of his critics and
detractors, that it resulted in the emancipation of this type of
building from an absurd and impossible convention--the practice,
common before his time, of piling order upon order, like a house
of cards, or by a succession of strongly marked string courses
emphasizing the horizontal dimension of a vertical edifice, thus
vitiating the finest effect of which such a building is capable.
The problem of the tall building, with which his predecessors dealt
always with trepidation and equivocation, Mr. Sullivan approached
with confidence and joy. "What," he asked himself, "is the chief
characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. This
loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It must be
tall. The force of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a
proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom
to top it is a unit without a dissenting line." The Prudential
(Guaranty) building in Buffalo represents the finest concrete
embodiment of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It marks his
emancipation from what he calls his "masonry" period, during which
he tried, like so many other architects before and since, to make a
steel-framed structure look as though it were nothing but a masonry
wall perforated with openings--openings too many and too great not
to endanger its stability. The keen blade of Mr. Sullivan's mind cut
through this contradiction, and in the Prudential building he carried
out the idea of a _protective casing_ so successfully that Montgomery
Schuyler said of it, "I know of no steel framed building in which the
metallic construction is more palpably felt through the envelope of
baked clay."
[Illustration: PLATE III. THE PRUDENTIAL BUILDING, BUFFALO N.Y.]
The present author can speak with all humbleness of the general
failure, on the part of the architectural profession, to appreciate
the importance of this achievement, for he pleads guilty of day after
day having passed the Prudential building, then fresh in the majesty
of its soaring lines, and in the wonder of its fire-wrought casing,
with eyes and admiration only for the false romanticism of the Erie
County Savings Bank, and the empty bombast of the gigantic Ellicott
Square. He had not at that period of his life succeeded in living down
his architectural training, and as a result the most ignorant layman
was in a better position to appraise the relative merits of these
three so different incarnations of the building impulse than was he.
Since the Prudential building there have been other tall office
buildings, by other hands, truthful in the main, less rigid, less
monotonous, more superficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail to
impart the feeling of utter sincerity and fresh originality inspired
by this building. One feels that here democracy has at last found
utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the
Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical
and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and
all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure,
laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand
for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicate
ornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is like
the very texture of their dreams. The building is able to speak
thus powerfully to the imagination because its creator is a poet
and prophet of democracy. In his own chosen language he declares, as
Whitman did in verse, his faith in the people of "these states"--"A
Nation announcing itself." Others will doubtless follow who will make
a richer music, commensurate with the future's richer life, but such
democracy as is ours stands here proclaimed, just as such feudalism
as is still ours stands proclaimed in the Erie County Bank just across
the way. The massive rough stone walls of this building, its pointed
towers and many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously symbolize the
attempt to impose upon the living present a moribund and alien
order. Democracy is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs find
architectural expression.
In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts are
less evident, less sharply marked. Domestic life varies little from
age to age; a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some manorial
mansion on the James River, built in Colonial days, remains a fitting
habitation (assuming the addition of electric lights and sanitary
plumbing) for one of our Captains of Industry, however little an
ancient tobacco warehouse would serve him as a place of business.
This fact is so well recognized that the finest type of modern country
house follows, in general, this or some other equally admirable model,
though it is amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudal
castle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence.
The "man of moderate means," so called, provides himself with
no difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished but
unpretentious, which fits him like a glove. There is a piazza towards
the street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for the
children, and a box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a back
yard.
For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor
so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the
speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each
intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving
him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of
indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or
houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home.
[Illustration: PLATE IV: THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK, BUFFALO, N.Y.]
It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a most
vital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes,
clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers was
either overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration,
and only now, after a year of participation in the war, is it
beginning to be adequately and officially dealt with--how efficiently
and intelligently remains to be seen. The housing of the soldiers was
another matter: that necessity was plain and urgent, and the miracle
has been accomplished, but except by indirection it has contributed
nothing to the permanent housing problem.
Other aspects of our life which have found architectural expression
fall neither in the commercial nor in the domestic category--the great
hotels, for example, which partake of the nature of both, and our
passenger railway terminals, which partake of the nature of neither.
These latter deserve especial consideration in this connection, by
reason of their important function. The railway is of the very essence
of the modern, even though (with what sublime unreason) Imperial Rome
is written large over New York's most magnificent portal.
Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind gives up the building
of temples. Temples inevitably arise where the tide of life flows
strongest; for there God manifests, in however strange a guise. That
tide is nowhere stronger than in the railroad, which is the arterial
system of our civilization. All arteries lead to and from the heart,
and thus the railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the center
of modern life. It is a true instinct therefore which prompts to
the making of the terminal building a very temple, a monument to
the conquest of space through the harnessing of the giant horses of
electricity and steam. This conquest must be celebrated on a scale
commensurate with its importance, and in obedience to this necessity
the Pennsylvania station raised its proud head amid the push-cart
architecture of that portion of New York in which it stands. It is not
therefore open to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is too
grand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur. If there be truth in the
contention that the living needs of today cannot be grafted upon the
dead stump of any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt to
accomplish this impossible will somehow, somewhere, reveal itself to
the discerning eye. Let us seek out, in this building, the place of
this betrayal.
It is not necessarily in the main façade, though this is not a face,
but a mask--and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful;
it is not in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops--for all we
know the arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it in
the splendid vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, in
which a subject of the Cæsars would have felt more perfectly at home,
perhaps, than do we. But beyond this passenger concourse, where the
elevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the
construction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns
and far-flung trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel
trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too useful
to be dispensed with. Rome could not help the architect here. The mode
to which he was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the building
demanded massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Cæsar
which could be paid everywhere but in this place. The architect's
problem then became to reconcile two diametrically different systems.
But between the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern
skeleton construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there is
no attempt at fusion. The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly
through the granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A.D. and
the twentieth are here in incongruous juxtaposition--a little thing,
easily overlooked, yet how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "God
is not mocked!"
The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue,
with however French an accent. Its façade suggests a portal, reminding
the beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a city
gate placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality as
in ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.
Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan's formula,
that a building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms,
which decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express the
function, the function determining and creating its appropriate form.
Here are two eminent examples of "arranged" architecture. Before
organic architecture can come into being our inchoate national life
must itself become organic. Arranged architecture, of the sort we
see everywhere, despite its falsity, is a true expression of the
conditions which gave it birth.
[Illustration: PLATE V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL TERMINAL]
The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris--what just and adequate
expression do they give of modern American life? Then shall we find in
our great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they represent, in the
phrase of Henry James, "a realized ideal" and a study of them should
reveal that ideal. From such a study we can only conclude that it
is life without effort or responsibility, with every physical need
luxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent
democracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may there
buy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. The
exceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badge
of nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudal
castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though entered
by a drawbridge and surrounded by a moat.
We need not even glance at the churches, for the tides of our
spiritual life flow no longer in full volume through their portals;
neither may the colleges long detain us, for architecturally
considered they give forth a confusion of tongues which has its
analogue in the confusion of ideas in the collective academic head.
Is our search for some sign of democracy ended, and is it vain? No,
democracy exists in the secret heart of the people, all the people,
but it is a thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred--the ideal
of brotherhood--that it is unmanifest yet in time and space. It is
a thing born not with the Declaration of Independence, but only
yesterday, with the call to a new crusade. The National Army is its
cradle, and it is nurtured wherever communities unite to serve the
sacred cause. Although menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism in
Europe, it perhaps stands in no less danger from the secret poison
of graft and greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritual
birth, and therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself
on space in terms of beauty such as the world has never known.
II
DURING THE WAR
The best thing that can be said about our immediate architectural
past is that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to an
architecture of democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architect
prospered, having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom's
a-cold on a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. This
is but natural; the architect, in so far as he is an artist, is a
purveyor of beauty; and the abnormal conditions inevitable to a state
of war are devastating to so feminine and tender a thing, even though
war be the very soil from which new beauty springs. With Mars in
mid-heaven how afflicted is the horoscope of all artists! The skilled
hand of the musician is put to coarser uses; the eye that learned
its lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of making invisible
warships and great guns. Let the architect serve the war-god likewise,
in any capacity that offers, confident that this troubling of the
waters will bring about a new precipitation; that once the war is
over, men will turn from those "old, unhappy, far-off things" to
pastures beautiful and new.
In whatever way the war may complicate the architect's personal
problem, it should simplify and clarify his attitude toward his art.
With no matter what seriousness and sincerity he may have undertaken
his personal search for truth and beauty, he will come to question,
as never before, both its direction and its results. He is bound to
perceive, if he does not perceive already, that the war's arrestment
of architecture (in all but its most utilitarian and ephemeral phases)
is no great loss to the world for the reason that our architecture was
uninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, without reverence, without
conviction: a thing which any wind of a new spirit was bound to make
appear foolish to a generation with sight rendered clairvoyant through
its dedication to great and regenerative ends.
He will come to perceive that between the Civil War and the crusade
that is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Now
materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government
by the _demos_, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, the
negation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot
believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can scarcely fail to
realize that materialism, everywhere entrenched, was entrenched
strongest in the camps of the rich---not the idle rich, for
materialism is so terrible a taskmaster that it makes its votaries its
slaves. These slaves, in turn, made a slave of the artist, a minister
to their pride and pretence. His art thus lacked that "sad sincerity"
which alone might have saved it in a crisis. When the storm broke
militant democracy turned to the engineer, who produced buildings at
record speed, by the mile, with only such architectural assistance as
could be first and easiest fished up from the dragnet of the draft.
In one direction only does there appear to be open water. Toward the
general housing problem the architectural profession has been spurred
into activity by reason of the war, and to its credit be it said, it
is now thoroughly aroused. The American Institute of Architects sent a
commissioner to England to study housing in its latest manifestations,
and some of the ablest and most influential members of that
organization have placed their services at the disposal of the
government. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part of
architects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The danger
dwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, their
services not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance,
or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively
provisional" methods which have governed the housing of workers
hitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and more
than recapture, their imperiled prestige, but under what changed
conditions, and with what an altered attitude toward their art and
their craft!
They will find that they must unlearn certain things the schools had
taught them: preoccupation with the relative merits of Gothic and
Classic--tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they must learn
certain neglected lessons from the engineer, lessons that they will
be able immeasurably to better, for although the engineer is a very
monster of competence and efficiency within his limits, these are
sharply marked, and to any detailed knowledge of that "beautiful
necessity" which determines spatial rhythm and counterpoint he is a
stranger. The ideal relation between architect and engineer is that of
a happily wedded pair--strength married to beauty; in the period just
passed or passing they have been as disgruntled divorcés.
[Illustration: PLATE VI. PLAN OF THE RED CROSS COMMUNITY CLUB HOUSE,
CAMP SHERMAN, OHIO]
The author has in mind one child of such a happy union brought about
by the war; the building is the Red Cross Community Club House at Camp
Sherman, which, in the pursuit of his destiny, and for the furtherance
of his education, he inhabited for two memorable weeks. He learned
there more lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled skeins of
destiny than he is ever likely to unravel. The matter has so direct a
bearing, both on the subject of architecture and of democracy, that it
is worth discussing at some length.
This club house stands, surrounded by its tributary dormitories, on a
government reservation, immediately adjacent to the camp itself,
the whole constituting what is known as the Community Center. By the
payment of a dollar any soldier is free to entertain his relatives
and friends there, and it is open to all the soldiers at all times.
Because the iron discipline of the army is relaxed as soon as the
limits of the camp are overpassed, the atmosphere is favourable to
social life.
The building occupies its acre of ground invitingly, though exteriorly
of no particular distinction. It is the interior that entitles it to
consideration as a contribution to an architecture of that new-born
democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of
this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built
by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger
uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this
particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross
is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and
mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its
upper stages, leaving the clear-story surrounding the crossing
unimpeded and well defined. The light comes for the most part from
high windows, filtering down, in tempered brightness to the floor. The
bones of the structure are everywhere in evidence, and an element of
its beauty, by reason of the admirably direct and logical
arrangement of posts and trusses. The vertical walls are covered with
plaster-board of a light buff color, converted into good sized
panels by means of wooden strips finished with a thin grey stain. The
structural wood work is stained in similar fashion, the iron rods,
straps, and bolts being painted black. This color scheme is
completed and a little enlivened by red stripes and crosses placed at
appropriate intervals in the general design.
The building attained its final synthesis through the collaboration of
a Cleveland architect and a National Army captain of engineers. It is
so single in its appeal that one does not care to inquire too closely
into the part of each in the performance; both are in evidence, for
an architect seldom succeeds in being so direct and simple, while an
engineer seldom succeeds in being so gracious and altogether suave.
Entirely aside from its æsthetic interest--based as this is on beauty
of organism almost alone--the building is notable for the success with
which it fulfils and co-ordinates its manifold functions: those of a
dormitory, a restaurant, a ballroom, a theatre, and a lounge. The
arm of the cross containing the principal entrance accommodates the
office, coat room, telephones, news and cigar stand, while leaving
the central nave unimpeded, so that from the door one gets the unusual
effect of an interior vista two hundred feet long. The restaurant
occupies the entire left transept, with a great brick fireplace at the
far end. There is another fireplace in the centre of the side of
the arm beyond the crossing; that part which would correspond in a
cathedral to the choir and apse being given over to the uses of a
reading and writing room. The right transept forms a theatre, on
occasion, terminating as it does with a stage. The central floor
spaces are kept everywhere free except in the restaurant, the sides
and angles being filled in with leather-covered sofas, wicker and
wooden chairs and tables, arranged in groups favourable to comfort and
conversation. Two stairways, at the right and left of the restaurant,
give access to the ample balcony and to the bedrooms, which occupy
three of the four ends of the arms of the cross at this level.
The appearance and atmosphere of this great interior is inspiring;
particularly of an evening, when it is thronged with soldiers, and
civilian guests. The strains of music, the hum of many voices, the
rhythmic shuffle on the waxed floor of the feet of the dancers--these
eminently social sounds mingle and lose themselves in the spaces of
the roof, like the voice of many waters. Tobacco smoke ascends like
incense, blue above the prevailing green-brown of the crowd, shot here
and there with brighter colors from the women's hats and dresses, in
the kaleidoscopic shifting of the dance. Long parallel rows of orange
lights, grouped low down on the lofty pillars, reflect themselves
on the polished floor, and like the patina of time on painted canvas
impart to the entire animated picture an incomparable tone. For the
lighting, either by accident or by inspiration, is an achievement
of the happiest, an example of the friendliness of fate to him who
attempts a free solution of his problem. The brackets consist merely
of a cruciform arrangement of planed pine boards about each column,
with the end grain painted red. On the under side of each arm of the
cross is a single electric bulb enclosed within an orange-coloured
shade to kill the glare. The light makes the bare wood of the fixture
appear incandescent, defining its geometry in rose colour with the
most beautiful effect.
The club house is the centre of the social and ceremonial life of the
camp, for balls, dinners, receptions, conferences, concerts without
number; and it has been the scene of a military wedding--the daughter
of a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president. To these events
the unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity new
to our social life. In our army camps social life is truly democratic,
as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told. Not alone
have the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but there
is a manifest _will-to-democracy_--the growing of a new flower of
the spirit, sown in a community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity,
perhaps, only in a community of suffering.
The author may seem to have over-praised this Community Club House;
with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appear
fatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so long, on a
building in a remote part of the Middle West: cheap, temporary,
and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection. But of the
transvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building is
an eminent example: it stands in symbolic relation to the times; it
represents what may be called the architecture of Service; it is among
the first of the new temples of the new democracy, dedicated to the
uses of simple, rational social life. Notwithstanding that it fills a
felt need, common to every community, there is nothing like it in
any of our towns and cities; there are only such poor and partial
substitutes as the hotel, the saloon, the dance hall, the lodge room
and the club. It is scarcely conceivable that the men and women who
have experienced its benefits and its beauty should not demand and
have similar buildings in their own home towns.
[Illustration: PLATE VII. INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITY
HOUSE]
Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretch
the cantonments--a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs
and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is the
architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of
Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary
suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the
speculative builder. Neither contain any enduring element of beauty.
But the love of beauty in one form or another exists in every human
heart, and if too long or too rigorously denied it finds its own
channels of fulfilment. This desire for self-expression through beauty
is an important, though little remarked phenomenon of these mid-war
times. At the camps it shows itself in the efforts of men of
specialized tastes and talents to get together and form dramatic
organizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by the
disposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and on
the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion
against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a
protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial
stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire
to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation
has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of
an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ugly
commercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration of
the more unpretentious class. This became articulate a few years ago
in the large number of books and magazines devoted to house-planning,
construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-craft. The success
which has attended these publications, and their marked influence,
give some measure of the magnitude of this revolt.
But now attention must be called to a significant, and somewhat
sinister fact. The professional in these various fields of æsthetic
endeavour, has shown either indifference or active hostility toward
all manner of amateur efforts at self-expression. Free verse aroused
the ridicule of the professors of metrics; the Little Theatre movement
was solemnly banned by such pundits as Belasco and Mrs. Fiske; the
Community Chorus movement has invariably met with opposition and
misunderstanding from professional musicians; and with few exceptions
the more influential architects have remained aloof from the effort
to give skilled architectural assistance to those who cannot afford to
pay them ten per cent.
Thus everywhere do we discover a deadening hand laid upon the
self-expression of the democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies
are of its own household; those who by nature and training should
be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their
fastidious, æsthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they
themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they
recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions--conventions
so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to
incarnate at all it must of necessity sweep them aside.