Hardly had the process of concentration and consolidation begun before
the proper form manifested itself. The occasion for its appearance
was the World’s Columbian Exposition, opened in 1893. In creating
this fair, the enterprise and capacity for organization which the
architects of Chicago had applied to the construction of the skyscraper
transformed the unkempt wilderness of Jackson Park into the Great
White City in the space of two short years. Here the architects of
the country, particularly of New York and Chicago, appeared for the
first time as a united profession, or, to speak more accurately, as
a college. Led by the New Yorkers, who had come more decisively under
European influence, they brought to this exposition the combination
of skill and taste in all the departments of the work that had, two
centuries earlier, created the magnificent formalities of Versailles.
There was unity of plan in the grouping of the main buildings about
the lagoon; there was unity of tone and color in the gleaming white
façades; there was unity of effect in the use of classic orders and
classic forms of decoration. Lacking any genuine unity of ideas and
purposes--for Root had initially conceived of a variegated oriental
setting--the architects of the exposition had achieved the effects of
unity by subordinating their work to an established precedent. They
chanted a Roman litany above the Babel of individual styles. It was a
capital triumph of the academic imagination. If these main buildings
were architecture, America had never seen so much of it at one time
before. Even that belated Greco-Puritan, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, was
warm in praise.
It would be foolish to quarrel with the style that was chosen for these
exposition buildings, or to deny its propriety. Messrs. McKim, White,
Hunt, and Burnham divined that they were fated to serve Renaissance
despots and emperors with more than Roman power, and unerringly they
chose the proper form for their activities. Whereas Rome had cast its
spell over the architects of the early Renaissance because they wished
once more to enter into its life, the life of its sages and poets and
artists, it attracted the architects of the White City because of its
external features--because of its stereotyped canons and rules--because
of the relatively small number of choices it offered for a lapse in
taste--because of its skill in conspicuous waste, and because of that
very noncommittal quality in its massive forms which permitted the
basilica to become a church, or the temple to become a modern bank.
Of all the Renaissance architects, their impulses and interests were
nearest, perhaps, to Robert Adam, whose church at West Wycombe could
be turned into a ballroom by the simple act of removing the pews, and
permitting the gay walls and decorations to speak for themselves.
Behind the white staff façade of the World’s Fair buildings was
the steel and glass structure of the engineer: the building spoke
one language and the “architecture” another. If the coming of
the skyscraper had turned masonry into veneer, here was a mode of
architecture which was little but veneer.
In their place, at the Fair, these classic buildings were all that
could be demanded: Mr. Geoffrey Scott’s defense of the Baroque, in
The Architecture of Humanism, applies particularly to its essential
manifestations in the Garden and the Theater--and why not in the Fair?
Form and function, ornament and design, have no inherent relation,
one with the other, when the mood of the architect is merely playful:
there is no use in discussing the anatomy of architecture when its
only aim is fancy dress. As a mask, as a caprice, the classic orders
are as justifiable as the icing on a birthday cake: they divert the
eye without damaging the structure that they conceal. Unfortunately,
the architecture of the Renaissance has a tendency to imitate the
haughty queen who advised the commons to eat cake. Logically, it
demands that a Wall Street clerk shall live like a Lombardy prince,
that a factory should be subordinated to esthetic contemplation; and
since these things are impossible, it permits “mere building” to
become illiterate and vulgar below the standards of the most debased
vernacular. Correct in proportion, elegant in detail, courteous in
relation to each other, the buildings of the World’s Fair were,
nevertheless, only the simulacra of a living architecture: they were
the concentrated expression of an age which sought to produce “values”
rather than goods. In comparison with this new style, the romanticism
of the Victorian Age, with its avid respect for the medieval building
traditions, was honesty and dignity itself.
The Roman precedent, modified by the work of Louis XIV and Napoleon
III, by Le Nôtre and Haussmann, formed the basis not merely for the
World’s Fair, but for the host of city plans that were produced in the
two decades that followed. It seemed for a while as if the architect
might take the place of the engineer as city planner, and that the
mangled regularity of the engineer’s gridiron plan, laid down without
respect to topographic advantage or to use, might be definitely
supplanted in the remodeled central districts and in the new extensions
and suburbs of the American city. The evil of the World’s Fair triumph
was that it suggested to the civic enthusiast that every city might
become a fair: it introduced the notion of the City Beautiful as a
sort of municipal cosmetic, and reduced the work of the architect to
that of putting a pleasing front upon the scrappy building, upon the
monotonous streets and the mean houses, that characterized vast areas
in the newer and larger cities.
If the engineer who had devoted himself to sewers and street-plans
alone had been superficial, the architectural city planner who centered
attention upon parkways alone, grand avenues alone, and squares like
the Place de l’Etoile alone, was equally superficial. The civic center
and the parkway represented the better and more constructive side
of this effort: in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in Springfield, Mass.,
harmonious groups of white buildings raised their heads above the
tangle of commercial traffic, and in the restoration of L’Enfant’s
plan for Washington, the realities of the imperial regime at length
caught up with the dreamer born out of his due time. A good many of
these plans, however, were pathetically immature. One of the reports
for Manhattan, for example, devoted pages and pages to showing the
improvement that would follow the demolition of the wall around Central
Park--and the importance of clipped trees in the design of grand
avenues!
Plainly, the architect did not face with sufficient realism the
colossal task with which he was confronted in the renovation of the
city. He accepted his improvements too much at the value placed upon
them by the leaders of Big Business--as a creator of land-values, as an
element in increasing the commercial attractiveness of the city. Did
not Mr. Daniel Burnham himself point to the improvements in Periclean
Athens, not as the embodiment of Athenian citizenship and religion at
its highest point, but as a measure for increasing the attractiveness
of the city to visitors from abroad? Cut off from his true function to
serve and beautify the community, made an accessory of business itself,
like the merest salesman or advertising agent, it is no wonder that the
architect speedily lost his leadership; and that the initiative went
once again into the hands of the engineer.
The main merit of all these efforts to perpetuate the World’s Fair is
that they sought to achieve some of the dignity and decisiveness of
the formal plan. Their weakness was that they neglected new elements,
like the billboard, the skysign, the subway, the tall building,
which undermined the effects of the plan even when it was achieved.
In their efforts to escape from the welter of misguided commercial
enterprise, the advocates of the city beautiful placed too great
reliance upon spots of outward order and decency; they took refuge in
the paper symmetry of axial avenues and round-points, as one finds
them in Haussmann’s Paris, and neglected the deeper and more genuine
beauties of, let us say, the High Street in Oxford or Chipping Camden,
or of many another European town that had achieved completion in its
essentials before the nineteenth century.
In short, the advocates of the city beautiful sought a remedy on paper
which could be purchased only by a thorough reorganization of the
community’s life. If all this applies to the better side of the World’s
Fair, it touches even more emphatically the worse.
The twenty years between 1890 and 1910 saw the complete rehabilitation
of the Roman mode, as the very cloak and costume of imperial
enterprise. The main effort of architecture was to give an effect of
dignity and permanence to the façades of the principal thoroughfares:
the public buildings must dominate the compositions, numerous
boulevards and avenues must concentrate the traffic at certain points
and guide the stranger to the markets and amusements: where possible,
as in the Chicago plan, by Messrs. Burnham and Bennett, avenues must be
cut through the gridiron pattern of blocks in order to achieve these
effects. If this imperial street system is somewhat arbitrary, and if
the necessary work of grading, filling, demolishing, and purchasing
existing property rights is extremely costly, the end, nevertheless,
justifies the means--the architecture impresses and awes a populace
that shares vicariously in it glories. Should the effect prove a little
too austere and formidable, the monuments will be offset with circuses
and hippodromes.
In all this, the World’s Fair was a precise and classic example, for
it reproduced in miniature the imperial order. When the panic of 1893
kept people away from the exhibitions of art, industry, and culture,
sideshows were promptly introduced by the astute organizers. Beyond
the serene classic façades, which recalled the elevation of a Marcus
Aurelius, sprawled the barkers, the freaks, and the tricksters, whose
gaudy booths might have reminded the spectator of the other side of the
imperial shield--the gaminism of Petronius Arbiter. The transformation
of these white façades into the Gay White Ways came during the next
decade; whilst the sideshows achieved a separate existence as “Coney
Island.” On top of this came the development of the mildly gladiatorial
spectacles of football and baseball: at first invented for playful
exercise, they became a standard means of exhibition by more or less
professional performers. The erection of numerous amphitheaters and
arenas, such as the Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, the Lewisohn
Stadium, and their counterparts in the West, rounded out the imperial
spectacle.
By a happy congruence of forces, the large-scale manufacture of
Portland cement, and the reintroduction of the Roman method of concrete
construction, came during the same period. Can anyone contemplate
this scene and still fancy that imperialism was nothing more than
a move for foreign markets and territories of exploitation? On the
contrary, it was a tendency that expressed itself in every department
of Western civilization, and if it appears most naked, perhaps, in
America, that is only because, as in the earlier periods, there was
so little here to stand in its way. Mr. Louis Sullivan might well
complain, in The Autobiography of an Idea, that imperialism stifled
the more creative modes of architecture which might have derived from
our fine achievements in science, from our tentative experiments in
democracy. It seems inevitable, however, that the dominant fact in our
civilization should stamp the most important monuments and buildings
with its image. In justice to the great professors of the classic
style, Messrs. McKim and Burnham and Carrere and Hastings, one must
admit that the age shaped them and chose them and used them for its
ends. Their mode of building was almost unescapably determined by the
milieu in which they worked.
The change in the social scene which favored an imperial setting was
not without its effects upon the industries that supplied the materials
for architecture, and upon the processes of building itself. Financial
concentration in the stone quarries, for example, was abetted by the
creation of a national system of rail transportation, and partly,
perhaps, by the elaboration of the mechanical equipment for cutting
and trimming stone beyond a point where a small plant could work
economically. The result was that during this period numerous small
local quarries, which had been called into existence by Richardson’s
fine eye for color contrasts, were allowed to lapse. Vermont marble and
Indiana limestone served better the traditions that had been created in
the White City.
The carrying of coals to Newcastle is always a pathetic practice; it
remained for the imperial age to make it a subject for boasting. Just
as many Connecticut towns whose nearby fields are full of excellent
granite boulders, boast a bank or a library of remote marble, so
New York City, which has a solid foundation of schist, gneiss, and
limestone, can point to only a handful of buildings, notably the
College of the City of New York and Mr. Goodhue’s Church of the
Intercession, in which these excellent local materials were used. The
curious result of being able by means of railway transportation to draw
upon the ends of the earth for materials has been, not variety, but
monotony. Under the imperial order the architect was forced to design
structures that were identical in style, treatment, and material,
though they were placed thousands of miles apart and differed in
every important function. This ignorance of regional resources is not
incompatible with grand effects, or even on occasion with decently good
architecture. But it does not profit by that fine adaptation to site,
that justness of proportion in the size of window and slope of roof,
which is an earnest of the architect’s mastery of the local situation.
Substitute Manila for the military colony of Timgad, or Los Angeles
for Alexandria, and it is plain that we have here another aspect of
Ferrero’s generalization. Even architects whose place of work was
nearer to the site of their buildings were, nevertheless, compelled to
copy the style of the more successful practitioners in New York and
Chicago.
In government, in industry, in architecture, the imperial age was
one. The underlying policy of imperialism is to exploit the life
and resources of separate regions for the benefit of the holders
of privilege in the capital city. Under this rule, all roads lead
literally to Rome. While, as the German historian, W. H. Riehl, points
out, the provincial highroads served to bring the city out into the
countryside, the railroads served to bring the major cities together
and to drain the products of rural regions into the metropolis. It was
no accident that the great triumphs of American architecture during
the imperial period were the railroad stations; particularly the
Pennsylvania and the Grand Central in New York, and the Union Station
in Washington. Nor is it by mere chance that the Washington and the
Pennsylvania stations are the monuments to two architects, McKim and
Burnham, who worshiped most whole-heartedly at the imperial shrine.
With capital insight, these men established the American Academy at
Rome: they recognized their home.
Esthetically considered, it is true, perhaps, that the finest element
in the Pennsylvania station is the train hall, where the architect has
dealt sincerely with his steel elements and has not permitted himself
to cast a fond, retrospective eye upon the Roman baths. When all
allowances are made, however, there remains less for criticism in the
railway stations and the stadiums--those genuinely Roman bequests--than
in any of the other imperial monuments. Indeed, so well does Roman
architecture lend itself to the railroad station that one of the prime
virtues of such a building, namely ease of circulation, was even
communicated to the New York Public Library, where it is nothing but a
nuisance, since it both increases the amount of noise and diminishes
the amount of space for reading rooms that are already overcrowded.
Here, indeed, is the capital defect of an established and formalized
mode: it tends to make the architect think of a new problem in terms
of an old solution for a different problem. Mr. Charles McKim, for
example, indignantly withdrew from the competition over the New York
Public Library because the demands of the librarian for a convenient
and expeditious administration of his business interfered with the
full-blown conception which Mr. McKim had in mind. All this happened
after years of demonstration in the Boston Library of Messrs. McKim and
White’s failure to meet that problem squarely; and it apparently was
not affected by Mr. McKim’s experience with the great Columbia Library,
which has ample space for everything except books. In short, the
classic style served well enough only when the building to be erected
had some direct relation to the needs and interests of the Roman
world--the concourse of idlers in the baths or the tiers of spectators
in the circuses and hippodromes. When it came face to face with our
own day, it had but little to say, and it said that badly, as anyone
who will patiently examine the superimposed orders on the American
Telegraph Building in New York will discover for himself.