One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the
introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major
L’Enfant, in the laying out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of
the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues
that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the
hunting forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a dignified pattern
upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington.
By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by providing
for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the
government, by planning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in
squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’Enfant gave great dignity
to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his
plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental
framework for the administrative buildings of the American State.
Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it
also has its abstractness: contrived to set off and serve the buildings
of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over
business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city.
The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone.
By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic
taste paved the way for the all too formal order of the gridiron plan,
and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commercial
exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold
that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast.
Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the
effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident;
whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in
the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more
and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated
nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses--this was the net
contribution of the formal plan. Classical taste was not responsible
for these enormities--but on the whole it did nothing to check them,
and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand
L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which
was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order.
With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with
the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence
of pioneer enterprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce,
and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all this was
indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned
republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe,
the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at
Washington--including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco
leaves--was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the
dissolution of its world of ideas; and there is a familiar ring to his
commentary upon it:
“I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over
head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social
Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution--I ask its pardon,
for it deserves better company--was a sort of dream of the Golden
Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should
be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions
in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent,
benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas!
experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken,
and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is
translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the
Republican court of Washington had affected wonderfully the advance
of riper years.”
Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me,
of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps
its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life
of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it.
Before the nineteenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased
to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood
was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or
destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity
of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport,
Maine; for there the serene, pillared façade is broken up in the rear
by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window
projected far enough beyond the eaves to give a little light to the
occupants of the rooms!
In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture
between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact--a
rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful,
would never countenance. These temples were built with the marmoreal
gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the
moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible.