Before we discuss the influence of machinery upon building, let us
consider the building itself as an architectural whole.
Up to the nineteenth century, a house might be a shelter and a work of
art. Once it was erected, it had few internal functions to perform: its
physiological system, if we may use a crude and inaccurate metaphor,
was of the lowest order. An open fire with a chimney, windows that
opened and closed--these were its most lively pretensions. Palladio,
in his little book on the Five Orders, actually has suggestions for
cooling the hot Italian villa by a system of flues conducted into an
underground chamber from which cold air would circulate; but this
ingenious scheme was on the plane of Leonardo’s flying machine--an
imaginative anticipation, I suppose, rather than a project.
With the exception of Wren’s suggestions for ventilating the Houses of
Parliament, and Sir Humphrey Davy’s actual installation of apparatus
for this purpose, it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century that engineers turned their minds to this problem, in America.
Yankee ingenuity had devised central heating before the Civil War,
and one of the first numbers of Harper’s Weekly contained an article
deploring the excessive warmth of American interiors; and at one time
or another during the century, universal running water, open plumbing,
gas, electric lighting, drinking fountains, and high speed electric
elevators made their way into the design of modern buildings. In Europe
these changes came reluctantly, because of the existence of vast
numbers of houses that had been built without a mechanical equipment;
so that many a student at the Beaux Arts returned from an attic in the
Latin quarter where water was carried in pails up to the seventh story,
to design houses in which the labor-saving devices became an essential
element in the plan. It is only now, however, during the last two
decades, that the full effect of these innovations has been felt.
The economic outcome of all these changes can be expressed
mathematically; and it is significant. According to an estimate by Mr.
Henry Wright in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects,
the structure of the dwelling house represented over ninety per cent
of the cost in 1800. Throughout the century there was a slow, steady
increase in the amount necessary for site, fixtures, and appliances,
until, in 1900, the curve takes a sharp upward rise; with the result
that in 1920 the cost of site and mechanical equipment has risen
to almost one-half the total cost of the house. If these estimates
apply to the simple dwelling house, they apply, perhaps, with even
greater force to the tenement, the office building, the factory, and
the loft: here the cost of ventilation, of fireproof construction,
of fire-prevention and fire-escaping devices, makes the engineering
equipment bulk even more heavily.
Whereas in the first stages of industrial development the factory
affected the environment of architecture, in its latest state
the factory has become the environment. A modern building is an
establishment devoted to the manufacture of light, the circulation
of air, the maintenance of a uniform temperature, and the vertical
transportation of its occupants. Judged by the standards of the
laboratory, the modern building is, alas! an imperfect machine: the
engineers of a certain public service corporation, for example,
have discovered that the habit of punching windows in the walls of
the building-machine is responsible for great leakages which make
difficult the heating and cooling of the plant; and they hold that the
maximum efficiency demands the elimination of windows, the provision of
“treated” air, and the lighting of the building throughout the day by
electricity.
All this would perhaps seem a little fantastic, were it not for the
fact that we have step by step approached the reality. Except for our
old-fashioned prejudice in favor of windows, which holds over from a
time when one could see a green field or a passing neighbor by sitting
at one, the transformation favored by the engineers has already been
accomplished. Just because of the ease in installing fans, lights,
and radiators in a modern building, a good part of the interiors
of our skyscrapers are fed day and night with artificial light and
ventilation. The margin of misuse under this method of construction
is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the
architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and
direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary
ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximum exploitation
of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the
engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute--“just as
good as the original” and much more expensive.
By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning,
we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative
devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce
electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where
we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where
we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density
would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water
hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst;
where we rob them of the faintest trace of vegetation or fresh air, we
build metalled roads which will take a small portion of them, once a
week, out into the countryside. It is all a very profitable business
for the companies that supply light and rapid transit and motor
cars, and the rest of it; but the underlying population pays for its
improvements both ways--that is, it stands the gratuitous loss, and it
pays “through the nose” for the remedy.
These mechanical improvements, these labyrinths of subways, these
audacious towers, these endless miles of asphalted streets, do not
represent a triumph of human effort: they stand for its comprehensive
misapplication. Where an inventive age follows methods which have no
relation to an intelligent and humane existence, an imaginative one
would not be caught by the necessity. By turning our environment over
to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held
out--that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our
existence.