To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on
the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to
rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr.
Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either
a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects,
according to the position one may take.
“As the building more and more takes on the character of the machine,”
says Mr. Jones, “so does its design, construction, and operation
become subject to the same rules that govern ... a locomotive. Our
grandfathers built for succeeding generations. The rate of development
was slow, and a building which would satisfy the demands made upon it
for a century would necessarily be of a substantial nature. But with
us in a single generation even the best we can do with all the data
and facilities at our command is out of date almost before it shows
signs of appreciable wear. So a building erected today is outclassed
tomorrow. The writer well remembers the late Douglas Robinson, when
outlining the location and property to be improved by the construction
of a building some twenty years ago, ending his directions with the
proviso that it must be ‘the cheapest thing that will hold together
for fifteen years’! When the amortization charges must be based on so
short a period as this, and with land taxes constantly increasing,
it becomes obvious that construction must be based upon a cubic foot
valuation that prohibits the use of any but the cheapest materials
and methods.... Even the cost of carrying the required capital
inactive during the period of production has its effect in speeding up
production to the point where every part of the building that, by any
ingenuity of man, can be machine-made must be so made.”
Since the features that govern the construction of modern buildings are
conditioned by external canons of mechanism, purpose and adaptation
to need play a small part in the design, and the esthetic element
itself enters largely by accident. The plan of the modern building
is not fundamental to its treatment; it derives automatically from
the methods and materials employed. The skyscraper is inevitably a
honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically
conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height
and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty
the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft;
and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become
apartments--indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small
scale. Where the need of spanning a great space without using pillars
exists, as in a theater or an auditorium, structural steel has given
the architect great freedom; and in these departments he has learned
to use his material well; for here steel can do economically and
esthetically what masonry can do only at an unseemly cost, or not at
all.
What is weak in some of our buildings, however, is not the employment
of certain materials, but the application of a single formula to every
problem. In the bare mechanical shell of the modern skyscraper there
is precious little place for architectural modulation and detail; the
development of the skyscraper has been towards the pure mechanical
form. Our first tall buildings were designed for the most part by
men who thought in terms of established architectural forms: Burnham
and Root’s Monadnock Building, in Chicago, which has exerted such a
powerful influence over the new school of German architects, was an
almost isolated exception; and, significantly enough, it did not employ
the steel skeleton! The academic architects compared the skyscraper
to a column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital; and they sought to
relieve its empty face with an elaborate modeling of surface, like
that of the old Flatiron Building. Then the skyscraper was treated as
a tower, and its vertical lines were accented by piers which simulated
the acrobatic leap of stone construction: the Woolworth Tower and
the Bush Tower were both designed in this fashion, and, in spite of
numerous defects in detail, they remain with the new Shelton Hotel in
New York among the most satisfactory examples of the skyscraper.
Neither column nor buttress has anything to do with the internal
construction of the skyscraper; both forms are “false” or “applied.”
Under the veracious lead of the late Mr. Louis Sullivan, the buildings
of the machine period have accepted the logic of the draped cube,
and the only gestures of traditional architecture that remain are
the ornaments that cling to the very highest and the very lowest
stories. Those buildings which do not follow this logic for the most
part accentuate the clumsy unimaginativeness of the designer: the new
Standard Oil building in New York, with its vestigial orders, shows an
interesting profile across the harbor almost in spite of itself, but at
a closer range will not bear criticism.
An ornamentalist, like Mr. Louis Sullivan, is perhaps at his best
against the simple planes of the modern building: but a different
order of imagination, an imagination like that of the Norman builders,
is powerless in the face of this problem--or it becomes brutal. If
modern building has become engineering, modern architecture retains a
precarious foothold as ornament, or to put it more frankly, as scene
painting. Indeed, what is the bare interior of a modern office or
apartment house but a stage, waiting for the scenery to be shifted,
and a new play to be put on. It is due to this similarity, I believe,
that modern interior decoration has so boldly accepted the standards
and effects of stage-design. A newspaper critic referred to Mr.
Norman-Bel Geddes as having lined the interior of the Century Theater
with a cathedral: well, in the same way, the interior of a modern
skyscraper is lined with a factory, an office, or a home.
It is not for nothing that almost every detail of the mechanized
building follows a standard pattern and preserves a studious anonymity.
Except for the short run of the entrance, the original architect has no
part in its interior development. If the architect himself is largely
paralyzed by his problem, what shall we say of the artisans, and of the
surviving handicraft workers who still contribute their quota of effort
to the laying of bricks and stones, to the joining of pipes, to the
plastering of ceilings? Gone are most of their opportunities for the
exercise of skilled intelligence, to say nothing of art: they might as
well make paper-boxes or pans for all the personal stamp they can give
to their work. Bound to follow the architect’s design, as the printer
is supposed to follow the author’s words, it is no wonder that they
behave like the poor drudge in the Chicago Exposition who left bare
or half-ornamented the columns which the architect had not bothered
to duplicate in full in the haste of finishing his drawing. Is it any
wonder, too, that the last vestige of guild standards is gone: that the
politics of industry, the bargaining for better wages and fewer hours,
concerns them more than their control over their job and the honor and
veracity of their workmanship? What kind of work can a man put into
“the cheapest building that will last fifteen years”?