IV

The chief justification for our achievements in mechanical architecture

has been brought forth by those who believe it has provided the

basis for a new style. Unfortunately, the enthusiasts who have put

the esthetic achievements of mechanical architecture in a niche by

themselves, and who have serenely disregarded all its lapses and

failures and inefficiencies, have centered their attention mainly upon

its weakest feature--the skyscraper. I cannot help thinking that they

have looked in the wrong place. The economic and social reasons for

regarding the skyscraper as undesirable have been briefly alluded to;

if they needed any further confirmation, a week’s experience of the

miseries of rapid transit would perhaps be sufficient. It remains to

point out that the esthetic reasons are just as sound.

All the current praise of the skyscraper boils down to the fact that

the more recent buildings have ceased to be as bad as their prototypes.

Granted. The uneasy hemming and hawing of ornament, which once agitated

the whole façade, has now been reduced to a concentrated gesture; and

the zoning ordinances that have been established in many large American

cities have transformed the older, top-heavy building into a tower or

a pyramid. That this is something of an advance is beyond dispute; in

New York one need only compare the Fisk Tire Building with the United

States Tire Building, representing respectively the later and the

earlier work of the same architects, to see what a virtue can be made

of legal necessity. A great architecture, however, is something to be

seen and felt and lived in. By this criterion most of our pretentious

buildings are rather pathetic.

When one approaches Manhattan Island, for instance, from the Staten

Island Ferry or the Brooklyn Bridge, the great towers on the tip of

the island sometimes look like the fairy stalagmites of an opened

grotto; and from an occasional vantage point on the twentieth floor of

an office building one may now and again recapture this impression.

But need I point out that one can count on one’s fingers the number

of buildings in New York or Chicago that one can approach from the

street in similar fashion? For the millions who fill the pavements and

shuttle back and forth in tubes, the skyscraper as a tall, cloudward

building does not exist. Its esthetic features are the entrance, the

elevator, and the window-pocked wall; and if there has been any unique

efflorescence of a fresh style at these points, I have been unable to

discover it.

What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their

photographs--and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted

to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of

the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street

never reaches. In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for

angels and aviators!

If buildings are to be experienced directly, and not through the

vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own

ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and

appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones;

and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of

building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly

and congestion. In order to accommodate the office-dwellers in the

Chicago Loop, for example, if a minimum of twenty stories were the

restriction, the streets would have to be 241 feet wide, according to

a calculation of Mr. Raymond Unwin, in the Journal of the American

Institute of Architects.

One need not dwell upon the way in which these obdurate, overwhelming

masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadows any

semblance of dignity as human beings; it is perhaps inevitable that one

of the greatest mechanical achievements in a thoroughly dehumanized

civilization should, no doubt unconsciously, achieve this wry purpose.

It is enough to point out that the virtues of the skyscraper are mainly

exercises in technique. They have precious little to do with the human

arts of seeing, feeling, and living, or with the noble architectural

end of making buildings which stimulate and enhance these arts.

A building that one cannot readily see, a building that reduces

the passerby to a mere mote, whirled and buffeted by the winds of

traffic, a building that has no accommodating grace or perfection in

its interior furnishing, beyond its excellent lavatories--in what

sense is such a building a great work of architecture, or how can

the mere manner of its construction create a great style? One might

as well say, with Robert Dale Owen, that the brummagem gothic of the

Smithsonian Institution was a return to organic architecture. Consider

what painful efforts of interior decoration are necessary before the

skyscraper-apartment can recapture the faded perfume of the home.

Indeed, it takes no very discerning eye to see that in a short time

we shall be back again in interiors belonging to the period of the

ottoman and the whatnot, in order to restore a homely sense of comfort

and esthetic ease to the eviscerated structure of the modern fireproof

apartment. What chiefly distinguishes our modern American work in this

department from that of the disreputable ’eighties is that the earlier

architects were conscious of their emptiness, and attempted feverishly

to hide it: whereas our moderns do not regard emptiness as a serious

lapse, and are inclined to boast about it.

There is a sense, of course, in which these modern colossi express our

civilization. It is a romantic notion, however, to believe that this

is an important or beautiful fact. Our slums express our civilization,

too, and our rubbish heaps tell sermons that our stones conceal. The

only expression that really matters in architecture is that which

contributes in a direct and positive way to the good life: that is

why there is so much beauty to the square foot in an old New England

village, and so little, beyond mere picturesqueness, in the modern

metropolis. A building stands or falls, even as a pure work of art, by

its just relation to the city around it. Without a sense of scale--and

the skyscraper has destroyed our sense of scale--the effect of any

single building is nullified.

V

The provinces in which mechanical architecture has been genuinely

successful are those in which there have been no conventional

precedents, and in which the structure has achieved a sense of

absolute form by following sympathetically the limitations of

material and function. Just as the bridge summed up what was best in

early industrialism, so the modern subway station, the modern lunch

room, the modern factory, and its educational counterpart, the modern

school, have often been cast in molds which would make them conspicuous

esthetic achievements. In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose

contains an inherent form; and it is only natural that a factory or

lunchroom or grain elevator, intelligently conceived, should become a

structure quite different in every aspect from the precedents that are

upheld in the schools.

It would be a piece of brash esthetic bigotry to deny the esthetic

values that derive from machinery: the clean surfaces, the hard lines,

the calibrated perfection that the machine has made possible carry

with them a beauty quite different from that of handicraft--but often

it is a beauty. Our new sensitiveness to the forms of useful objects

and purely utilitarian structures is an excellent sign; and it is not

surprising that this sensitiveness has arisen first among artists.

Many of our power-plants are majestic; many of our modern factories

are clean and lithe and smart, designed with unerring logic and

skill. Put alongside buildings in which the architect has glorified

his own idiosyncrasy or pandered to the ritual of conspicuous waste,

our industrial plants at least have honesty and sincerity and an

inner harmony of form and function. There is nothing peculiar to

machine-technology in these virtues, however, for the modern factory

shares them with the old New England mill, the modern grain elevator

with the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship with the clipper, and the

airplane hangar with the castle.

The error with regard to these new forms of building is the attempt

to universalize the mere process or form, instead of attempting to

universalize the scientific spirit in which they have been conceived.

The design for a dwelling-house which ignores everything but the

physical necessities of the occupants is the product of a limited

conception of science which stops short at physics and mechanics, and

neglects biology, psychology, and sociology. If it was bad esthetics

to design steel frames decorated with iron cornucopias and flowers,

it is equally bad esthetics to design homes as if babies were hatched

from incubators, and as if wheels, rather than love and hunger, made

the world go round. During the first movement of industrialism it was

the pathetic fallacy that crippled and warped the new achievements of

technology; today we are beset by the plutonic fallacy, which turns all

living things it touches into metal.

In strict justice to our better sort of mechanical architecture, I

must point out that the error of the mechanolators is precisely the

opposite error to that of the academies. The weakness of conventional

architecture in the schools of the nineteenth century was the fact

that it applied only to a limited province: we knew what an orthodox

palace or post office would be like, and we had even seen their guilty

simulacra in tenement-houses and shopfronts; but no one had ever dared

to imagine what a Beaux Arts factory would be like; and such approaches

to it as the pottery works in Lambeth only made the possibility more

dubious. The weakness of our conventional styles of architecture was

that they stopped short at a province called building--which meant the

province where the ordinary rules of esthetic decency and politeness

were completely abandoned, for lack of a precedent.

The modernist is correct in saying that the mass of building ought

to speak the same language; it is well for him to attempt to follow

Mr. Louis Sullivan, in his search for a “rule so broad as to admit

of no exceptions.” Where the modernist becomes confused, however, is

in regarding the _dictionary_ of modern forms, whose crude elements

are exhibited in our factories and skyscrapers and grain elevators,

as in any sense equivalent for their creative expression. So far our

mechanical architecture is a sort of structural Esperanto: it has a

vocabulary without a literature, and when it steps beyond the elements

of its grammar it can only translate badly into its own tongue the

noble poems and epics that the Romans and Greeks and medieval builders

left behind them.

The leaders of modernism do not, indeed, make the mistake that some of

their admirers have made: Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright’s pleasure pavilions

and hotels do not resemble either factories or garages or grain

elevators: they represent the same tendencies, perhaps, but they do so

with respect to an entirely different set of human purposes. In one

important characteristic, Mr. Wright’s style has turned its back upon

the whole world of engineering: whereas the steel cage lends itself to

the vertical skyscraper, Mr. Wright’s designs are the very products

of the prairie, in their low-lying, horizontal lines, in their flat

roofs, while at the same time they defy the neutral gray or black or

red of the engineering structure by their colors and ornament.

In sum, the best modern work does not merely respect the machine:

it respects the people who use it. It is the lesser artists and

architects who, unable to control and mold the products of the machine,

have glorified it in its nakedness, much as the producer of musical

comedies, in a similar mood of helpless adulation, has “glorified” the

American girl--as if either the machine or the girl needed it.

It has been a genuine misfortune in America that, as Mr. Sullivan

bitterly pointed out in The Autobiography of an Idea, the growth of

imperialism burked the development of a consonant modern style. In

Europe, particularly in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the best

American work has been appreciated and followed up, and as so often

happens, exaggerated; so that the esthetic appreciation of the machine

has been carried across the Atlantic and back again, very much in the

way that Emerson’s individualism was transformed by Nietzsche and

became the mystic doctrine of the Superman. Some of the results of this

movement are interesting and valid: the work of the Dutch architects,

for example, in the garden suburbs around Amsterdam: but what pleases

one in these new compositions is not the mechanical rigor of form but

the playfulness of spirit--they are good architecture precisely because

they are something more than mere engineering. Except for a handful of

good precedents, our mechanical work in America does not express this

vitality. The machine has stamped us; and we have not reacted.

Moreover, in the building of separate houses in the city and its

suburbs, where the demands of mechanical efficiency are not so drastic

as they are in the office building, the effect of the machine process

has been to narrow the scope of individual taste and personality.

The designer, whether he is the architect, the owner, or the working

contractor, works within a tradition whose bearing lies beyond him.

Outside this mechanical tradition we have had many examples of good

individual work, like the stone houses that have been erected around

Philadelphia, and the more or less native cement and adobe houses in

New Mexico and California: but the great mass of modern houses are no

longer framed for some definite site and some definite occupants: they

are manufactured for a blind market. The boards are cut to length in

the sawmill, the roofing is fabricated in a roofing plant, the window

frames are cut in standard sizes and put together in the framing

factory, the balustrade is done in a turning mill, the very internal

fittings like china closets and chests are made in a distant plant,

after one of a dozen patterns fixed and exemplified in the catalog.

The business of the building worker is reduced to a mere assemblage

of parts; and except for the more expensive grades of work, the

architect is all but eliminated. The charming designs that the European

modernists make testify to the strength of their long architectural

tradition even in the face of machinery; the truth is that they fit

our modern methods of house-production scarcely much better than the

thatched cottage of clay and wattle. The nemesis of mechanism is that

it inexorably eliminates the architect--even the architect who worships

its achievements!

So much of the detail of a building is established by factory standards

and patterns that even the patron himself has precious little scope

for giving vent to his impulses in the design or execution of the

work; for every divergence from a standardized design represents an

additional expense. In fact, the only opportunity for expressing his

taste and personality is in choosing the mode in which the house is to

be built: he must find his requirements in Italy, Colonial America,

France, Tudor England, or Spain--woe to him if he wants to find them

in twentieth-century America! Thus the machine process has created a

standardized conception of style: of itself it can no more invent a new

style than a mummy can beget children. If one wishes a house of red

brick it will be Georgian or Colonial; that is to say, the trimming

will be white, the woodwork will have classic moldings, and the

electric-light fixtures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal.

If one builds a stucco house, one is doomed by similar mechanical

canons to rather heavy furniture in the early Renaissance forms,

properly duplicated by the furniture makers of Grand Rapids--and so on.

The notion of an American stucco house is so foreign to the conception

of the machine mode that only the very poor, and the very rich, can

afford it. Need I add that Colonial or Italian, when it falls from the

mouth of the “realtor” has nothing to do with authentic Colonial or

Italian work?

Commercial concentration and the national market waste resources by

neglect, as in the case of the Appalachian forests they squandered

them by pillage. Standardized materials and patterns and plans and

elevations--here are the ingredients of the architecture of the machine

age: by escaping it we get our superficially vivacious suburbs; by

accepting it, those vast acres of nondescript monotony that, call

them West Philadelphia or Long Island City or what you will, are but

the anonymous districts of Coketown. The chief thing needful for the

full enjoyment of this architecture is a standardized people. Here our

various educational institutions, from the advertising columns of the

five-cent magazine to the higher centers of learning, from the movie to

the radio, have not perhaps altogether failed the architect.

The manufactured house is set in the midst of a manufactured

environment. The quality of this environment calls for satire rather

than description; and yet a mere catalog of its details, such as Mr.

Sinclair Lewis gave in Babbitt, is almost satire in itself. In this

environment the home tends more and more to take last place: Mr. Henry

Wright has in fact humorously suggested that at the present increasing

ratio of site-costs--roads, sewers, and so forth--to house-costs, the

house itself will disappear in favor of the first item by 1970. The

prophetic symbol of this event is the tendency of the motor-car and

the temple-garage to take precedence over the house. Already these

incubi have begun to occupy the last remaining patch of space about the

suburban house, where up to a generation ago there was a bit of garden,

a swing for the children, a sandpile, and perhaps a few fruit trees.

The end of a civilization that considers buildings as mere machines is

that it considers human beings as mere machine-tenders: it therefore

frustrates or diverts the more vital impulses which would lead to the

culture of the earth or the intelligent care of the young. Blindly

rebellious, men take revenge upon themselves for their own mistakes:

hence the modern mechanized house, with its luminous bathroom, its

elegant furnace, its dainty garbage-disposal system, has become

more and more a thing to get away from. The real excuse for the

omnipresent garage is that in a mechanized environment of subways and

house-machines some avenue of escape and compensation must be left

open. Distressing as a Sunday automobile ride may be on the crowded

highways that lead out of the great city, it is one degree better than

remaining in a neighborhood unsuited to permanent human habitation. So

intense is the demand for some saving grace, among all these frigid

commercial perfections, that handicraft is being patronized once more,

in a manner that would have astonished Ruskin, and the more audacious

sort of interior decorator is fast restoring the sentimentalities in

glass and wax flowers that marked the Victorian Age. This is a pretty

comment upon the grand achievements of modern industry and science; but

it is better, perhaps, that men should be foolish than that they should

be completely dehumanized.

The architecture of other civilizations has sometimes been the brutal

emblem of the warrior, like that of the Assyrians: it has remained for

the architecture of our own day in America to be fixed and stereotyped

and blank, like the mind of a Robot. The age of the machine has

produced an architecture fit only for lathes and dynamos to dwell

in: incomplete and partial in our applications of science, we have

forgotten that there is a science of humanity, as well as a science

of material things. Buildings which do not answer to this general

description are either aristocratic relics of the age of handicraft,

enjoyed only by the rich, or they are fugitive attempts to imitate

cheaply the ways and gestures of handicraft.

We have attempted to live off machinery, and the host has devoured us.

It is time that we ceased to play the parasite: time that we looked

about us, to see what means we have for once more becoming men. The

prospects of architecture are not divorced from the prospects of the

community. If man is created, as the legends say, in the image of

the gods, his buildings are done in the image of his own mind and

institutions.