I
The decade between 1890 and 1900 saw the rise of a new period in
American architecture. This period had, it is true, been dimly
foreshadowed by the grandiose L’Enfant, but if the superficial forms
resembled those of the early republic, and if the precedents of classic
architecture again became a guide, the dawning age was neither a
revival nor a continuation.
In the meanwhile, fresh influences had entered. The generation of
students who had studied in the Ecole des Beaux Arts after the Civil
War was ready, at last, to follow the lone trail which Richard H. Hunt
had blazed. Richardson’s most intimate disciples reacted against the
stamp of his personality and sought a more neutral mode of expression,
consecrated by established canons of good taste. On top of this, the
introduction of steel-cage construction removed the necessity for solid
masonry, and placed a premium upon the mask. The stage was set for a
new act of the drama.
All these influences shaped the style of our architecture when it
arose; but the condition that gave it a substantial base was the rise
of a new order in America’s economic life. Up to this time, the chief
industrial problem had been to improve the processes of mechanical
production and to stake out new areas for exploitation. One may compare
these economic advances to the separate sorties of an army operating on
a wide front: any lone adventurer might take his courage in his hands
and exploit an invention, or sink an oil well, if he could find it.
By 1890 the frontier had closed; the major resources of the country
were under the control of the monopolist; it became more important
to consolidate gains than freshly to achieve them. Separate lines of
railroads were welded into systems; separate steel plants and oil
plants were wrought into trusts; and where monopoly did not rest upon a
foundation of natural advantage, the “gentleman’s agreement” began its
service as a useful substitute. The popular movements which sought to
challenge the forces of this new regime--the labor movement, socialism,
populism--had neither analyzed the situation with sufficient care nor
attracted the adherence of the majority. The defeat of Henry George as
a local political candidate was symbolic: by 1888 a humane thinker
like Edward Bellamy had already accepted the defeat, had embraced the
idea of the trust, and had conceived a comprehensive utopia on the
basis of letting the process of monopoly go the limit, so that finally,
by a mere yank of the levers, the vast economic organizations of the
country would become the “property” of the people.
The drift to the open lands came to a full pause. The land-empire had
been conquered, and its overlords were waxing in power and riches: the
name “millionaire” became the patent of America’s new nobility. With
the shift from industry to finance went a shift from the producing
towns to the spending towns: architecture came to dwell in the stock
exchanges, the banks, the shops, and the clubs of the metropolis; if it
sought the countryside at all, it established itself in the villas that
were newly laid out on hill and shore in the neighborhood of the great
cities. The keys to this period are opulence and magnitude: “money to
burn.”
These years witnessed what the Roman historian, Ferrero, has called
a “_véritable recommencement d’histoire_.” In the new centers of
privilege there arose a scale of living and a mode of architecture
which, with all its attendant miseries, depletions, and exploitations,
recalled the Rome of the first and second centuries after Christ. It is
needless to say that vast acres of buildings, factories, shops, homes,
were erected which had no relation at all to the imperial regime; for
not everyone participated in either the benefits or the depressions
that attended the growth of monopoly; but the accent of this period,
the dominant note, was an imperial one. While the commonplace building
of the time cannot be ignored, it remains, so to say, out of the
picture.