The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly
or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and
from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern
Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a
certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America.
Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its
columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in
America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an
extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact
that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first
example of it had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows
perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side
of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no
doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms.
On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For
one thing, since the Greek _cella_ had no source of light except the
doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation,
and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the
vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies
proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture
was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the
greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable
to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their
attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir
Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the
outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the
interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a
habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often
remained bleak.
Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of building was not a
full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic
orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors
resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph
would represent a sunrise--the warm tones, the colors, the dancing
procession of sculptures were absent; it was a thinned and watered
Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the disciples of the Age of
Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt,
at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would
doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which
Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased
to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it
ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? That is
a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder
that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil
War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large
household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.
It was in public architecture that the early republic succeeded best,
and it was here that its influence lingered longest, for down to 1840
well-designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub-Treasury
building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New
York, Hoadley in Connecticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to
mention only a few of the leading architects, represents the high-water
mark of professional design in America; and the fact that in spite
of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is
still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of
their tradition. For all its minor felicities, however, we must not
make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball,
who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a
foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far
divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture
which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings, and
factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures
in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance
have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall
is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same
elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different
effect. In the architecture of the early republic, on the other hand,
the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a
mansion, for any external differentiation one can observe--in fact, the
only ecclesiastical feeling that goes with the churches of the time
is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost
entirely the memories and associations of the intervening centuries.
This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by composing
differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in
the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the
structure happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable
in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious
and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of
the early republic is tedious and banal.