"A round court house, you say? Suggestive of the Colosseum, with a touch
of the Tower of Babel, and the merest _soupçon_ of Barnum and Bailey?
Come then, why not? To me it is eminently just that your architecture
should typify the different racial strains that have entered into the
making of the American people. When one observes in the façade of your
magnificent public buildings the characteristic marks of the Chinese,
the Red Indian, the Turco-Tartar, the Provençal, the Lombard
Renaissance, the Eskimo, and the Late Patagonian, one catches for the
first time the full meaning of your so complex civilisation."
The distinguished philosopher turned in his seat, struck a match on a
marble bust of Immanuel Kant just behind him, and lit his cigar. He
gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Before him stretched the
enchanting panorama of Paris so familiar to American eyes--Notre Dame,
the Gare de St. Lazare, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower, the
cypresses of Père Lachaise, the tomb of Napoleon, and the offices of the
American Express Company.
"Yes," he said, "one envies the advantages of your multi-millionaires.
The kings and princes of former times, when they built themselves a
home, had to be content with a single school of architecture. Your rich
men on Fifth Avenue may have two styles, three, four--what say I?--a
dozen! And on their country estates, where there is a garage, a
conservatory, stables, kennels, the opportunities are unlimited."
"But we have pretty well exhausted all the known styles," I said. "What
about the future?"
"Have no fear," he replied. "The archæologists are continually digging
up new monuments of primitive architecture. By the time you need a new
City Hall excavations will be very far advanced in Peru and Ceylon.
"The one secret of great architecture," M. Bergson went on, "is that it
shall contain a soul, that it shall be the expression of an idea. A
splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder is what I
regard as the American Idea. Hence the perfect propriety of a
fifty-story Venetian tower overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to the
Presbyterian form of worship. Too many of my countrymen are tempted to
scoff at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a skyscraper perfectly
expresses the spirit of a people which has created Pittsburg, the Panama
Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain of opera houses. Take your loftiest
structures in New York and think what they stand for."
I thought in accordance with instructions, and recognised that the three
tallest structures in New York symbolised, respectively, the triumph of
the five and ten cent store, the sewing machine, and industrial
insurance at ten cents a week.
"In your skyscrapers," he went on, "there speaks out the soul of
American idealism."
I recalled what a drug the skyscrapers are on the real estate market,
how they yield an average of two per cent. on the cost, and I decided
that our tall buildings are indeed the expression of uncompromising
idealism. As an investment there was little to be said for them.
"I repeat," said M. Bergson, "your skyscrapers stand for an idea, but
they also express beauty. Not only do they reveal the restless energy of
a people which waits five minutes to take the elevator from the tenth
floor to the twelfth, but they also embody the most modern conception of
fine taste. I think of them as displaying the perfection of the
hobble-skirt in architecture--tall, slim, expensive, and never failing
to catch the eye."
We were interrupted by a trim-looking maid who brought in a telegram. My
host tore open the envelope, glanced at the message, and handed it to me
with a smile. It was from a Chicago vaudeville manager who offered M.
Bergson five thousand dollars a week for a series of twenty-minute talks
on the influence of Creative Evolution on the Cubist movement to be
illustrated with motion pictures. I handed the telegram to M. Bergson,
who dropped it into the waste basket.
"People," he said, "have fallen into the habit of asserting that beauty
in architecture is not to be separated from utility. To be beautiful a
building must at once reveal the use to which it is devoted. But this
need not mean that a certain architectural type must be devoted to a
certain purpose. The essential thing is uniformity. The same form should
be devoted to the same purpose. Then there would be no trouble in
learning the peculiar architectural language of a city. When I was in
New York I experienced no difficulty whatsoever. When I saw a Corinthian
temple I knew it was a church. When I saw a Roman basilica I knew it was
a bank. When I saw a Renaissance palace I knew it was a public bath
house. When I saw an Assyrian palace I knew there was a cabaret tea
inside. When I saw a barracks I knew it was a college laboratory. When I
saw a fortress I knew it was an aquarium. The soul of the city spoke out
very clearly to me."
He thought for a moment.
"But yes," he said. "When I think of New York and its architecture I am
more than ever convinced that there is no such a thing as
predestination, that your American architect is emphatically a free
agent."
"This seems so very true," I murmured.
"Recently," he went on, "when I was the guest of your most hospitable
countrymen there was a sharp controversy regarding the appropriateness
of the architect's design for a memorial to be erected to your immortal
Lincoln in the national capital. There were critics who professed to be
shocked by the incongruity of placing a statue of Lincoln, the
frontiersman, the circuit-rider of your raw Middle West, the teller of
most amusing anecdotes, amusing, but--somewhat Gothic, shall I
say?--putting a statue of this typical American inside a temple of pure
Grecian design. Such critics, in my opinion, were in error. They made
the same mistake of concentrating on the specific use, instead of
searching after the broad meaning. Lincoln was an American. His monument
should be American in spirit. And I contend that it is the American
spirit to put a statesman in frock coat and trousers inside a Greek
temple. For that matter, what structural form is there which one might
call typical of your country, outside of your skyscrapers?"
"There is the log cabin," I said, "but that would hardly bear
reproduction in marble. And there is the baseball stadium, but somehow
that sounds rather inappropriate."
"So I should earnestly advise you," continued M. Bergson, "not to waste
time in studying what your architectural types ought to be, but to build
as the fancy seizes you. In the course of time the right fancy may seize
you. If anything, avoid striving for perfection. Continue to mix your
styles. It is not essential to cling to the original plans once you have
started. Change your plans as you go along. Avoid the spick and span. If
your foundations begin to sag a little before the roof is completed, so
much the better. If the right wing of your building is out of line with
the left wing, let it go at that. If your interior staircases blind the
windows, if your halls run into a _cul-de-sac_, instead of leading
somewhere, let them."
"But that is precisely the way we build our State Capitols," I said.
"Then you are to be congratulated on having solved the problem of a
national style," said M. Bergson.