Architecture: Conflicting Currents

ARCHITECTURE: CONFLICTING CURRENTS

The Old versus the New

By the 1910s the two major tendencies in twentieth-century architecture were already evident. One leaned toward the past, reviving styles from bygone eras, often in hopes of reinvigorating the faith and sense of community of older generations that twentieth-century architects feared were gone forever. This inclination was embodied in the work of architects trained at or influenced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in the neo-Gothic revival. The other looked toward the future, demanding that a new architectural vernacular be developed to meet the needs of technologically advanced, fast-paced, and scientifically enlightened modern life. Students of the Chicago school of urban architecture—and others who demanded that form follow function—were the chief proponents of this movement. Architects following both trends benefited from the vast expansion of the American economy—captains of industry, presidents of colleges, city boosters, new homeowners, and others were looking to put their marks on the landscape and had the cash to do so.

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, there were no architectural schools in America. People who wanted to become architects either apprenticed themselves to individuals engaged in designing and constructing buildings or went to Europe to study. The most prestigious school of architecture was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There American students learned the formal practice of architecture by studying the architectural treatises and creations of great classical and Renaissance architects. Even as American architecture programs began to be established—the first was founded in 1868 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—American graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts continued to command the most prestige, and their work was widely imitated. The biggest boost to the reputation of the Beaux-Arts style in America came with the opening of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition featured a monumental White City, designed by the Chicago firm of Burnham and Root. These enormous faux-marble Beaux-Arts-inspired buildings surrounding a reflecting pool influenced American civic architecture for decades. Some of the best-known students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts included Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White in New York and the West Coast architect Julia Morgan.

The Skyscrapers of Chicago

The city of Chicago, burned almost to the ground in 1871, was the birthplace of the modern skyscraper. There engineers and architects perfected the elevator and central heating, both critical to the development of buildings more than several stories high. Another major innovation was the discovery of how to distribute the weight of a massive building. In the 1880s architect William Le Baron Jenney abandoned traditional masonry and used a steel frame to anchor a building, covering it with a curtain wall—a. decorative, rather than structural, stone facade. Using a steel frame allowed architects to speed construction, to make buildings taller, and to enlarge windows. The prominent Chicago architect Louis Sullivan declared that "form should follow function," calling for an "organic" process in which new buildings should be designed in a way that grew naturally from their projected use. Sullivan, whose actual practice was at its height before 1900, intended this approach as an alternative to the formal, tradition-bound inorganic design process used by students of the Beaux-Arts school. As a result of Sullivan's influence, the historical bric-a-brac that adorned even the tallest buildings began to seem inappropriate to some architects. The organic aesthetic of Sullivan and his students—among them Frank Lloyd Wright—became famous as the main contribution of the Chicago school to American architecture.

Corporate Giants and Tall Buildings

Other architects were happy to provide corporate chieftains with buildings to match their egos. Skyscrapers were considered proof of a successful business endeavor—the more successful the company, the more stories in its skyscraper. City building codes could not keep pace with the challenges presented by buildings that blocked the sun and created new weather patterns. Lower Manhattan in particular suffered from the multiple-story buildings that began crowding along its narrow streets in the early twentieth century. It was not until 1916 that New York was able to pass regulations that required buildings higher than one hundred feet to be tapered away from the street.

The Woolworth Building

Frank W. Woolworth, the mastermind of the dramatic nationwide expansion of five-and-ten-cent stores, set out to build a New York City skyscraper that would steal the spotlight from the forty-seven-story Singer Building, designed by Ernest Flagg and completed in 1907. Woolworth hired architect Cass Gilbert, who served as president of the American Institute of Architects in 1908-1909. Gilbert had been an assistant to Stanford White for two years and was well versed in the Beaux-Arts style, and Woolworth had a model in mind: the Victoria Tower of the British Houses of Parliament. Gilbert obliged Woolworth by melding feathery French and English Gothic styles in a tower that was frosted with colored terra cotta and rose 792 feet over lower Manhattan. After the building was completed in 1913, it was nicknamed "The Cathedral of Commerce Woolworth Building, New York City" and took the record of tallest building in the world away from the New York Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, completed in 1909. "The Cathedral of Commerce" held its record until 1930, when the seventy-five-story Art-Deco Chrysler Building was completed in midtown Manhattan.

Innovation on Hold

Under the conservative influence of businessmen and Beaux-Arts architects, most innovation in American commercial architecture stalled in the 1910s. While the skyscraper was hailed by Europeans as a distinctly American contribution to the history of design, its basic premises did not evolve far from where the Chicago School had taken them. Not until after World War I, when Eliel Saarinen of Finland took second prize with a semimodern design in the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition, did the skyscraper begin to move away from the B eaux-Arts tradition.

Midway Gardens

There were significant exceptions in areas other than skyscraper architecture. Among them were Frank Lloyd Wright's ziggurat-like Midway Gardens, a restaurant and concert complex that was completed in Chicago in 1913 and was demolished during the Depression. Midway Gardens marked the most comprehensive expression of Wright's aesthetic vision. Along with designing the many-terraced concrete-and-brick building, Wright created the plans for landscaping, lighting, decorating, and furnishing it. His next major public project, the Imperial Hotel in Japan (1915-1922), expanded even further on the ideas he explored in his designs for Midway Gardens.

A PIONEERING FEMALE ARCHITECT

Only the second woman to graduate from the architectural program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marion Mahony Griffin (1871 1962) was the first licensed woman architect in Illinois and an important exponent of the Prairie Style of architecture developed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1895, the year after she graduated from MIT, she went to work at Wright's studio. She quickly gained international recognition for her brilliant architectural draftsmanship and the unusual beauty of her renderings. While she worked for Wright she designed several important projects, not all of which were fully credited to her during her lifetime. (In an unpublished autobiography, "The Magic of America," she discussed her work at Wright's studio and recorded her contributions.) One of her earliest projects was the Church of All Souls (1903), a Unitarian chapel in Evanston, Illinois, which incorporates Gothic design elements with the Prairie Style. Later works include the David M. Amberg house (1909-1910) in Grand Rapids, Michigan; the Adolph Mueller house (1910) in Decatur, Illinois; and the Henry Ford house (1912) in Dearborn, Michigan. All these projects reveal Griffin's enthusiasm for local stone. Griffin also designed furniture, interior accessories, decorative wall panels, mosaics, and murals for Wright. In 1914 she moved to Australia with her husband, architect Walter Burley Griffin, whom she had married in 1911. For the next twenty years she collaborated with her husband on many projects but never produced another solo design.

Sources:

H. Allen Brooks, The Prairie School (New York: Norton, 1976);

Frederick Gutheim, Entry on Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin, in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, with llene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 292-294.

OUT WITH THE OLD

In 1910 Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that Americans in general, and wealthy Americans in particular, had become sycophantic followers of the Beaux-Arts style of architecture: "Painfully conscious of their lack of traditions, our powerful get-rich-quick citizens attempt to buy Tradition ready made and are dragged forward facing backwards." He placed the blame on the sort of education architects were getting, taking a not-too-subtle jab at the pervasive influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on American architecture. Instead of relying on outworn models, Wright said, Americans should rise to the challenges of modern life when they chose the design for their homes. "To thus make of a human dwelling-place a complete work of art, in itself expressive and beautiful, intimately related to modern life and fit to live in," Wright wrote, was the opportunity of American architecture.

Source:

Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn, eds., Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings (New York: Horizon, 1973).

Albert Kahn

Another innovator was the German-born architect Albert Kahn, who immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eleven years old. When Kahn began designing factories in 1903, he usually competed against junior draftsmen, because architects tended to consider such assignments tedious and undeserving of their talents. Kahn brought the insight of an engineer and the inspiration of a visionary to the task. Using reinforced concrete and steel, he was able to make buildings large enough to contain entire operations under one roof—and soon on one floor. The automobile industry was the main beneficiary of Kahn's work: in 1903 he designed the Packard Motor Company Plant in Detroit, and in 1910 his Ford Motor Company plant at Highland Park was completed. In 1917 Kahn created the half-mile-long Building B for Ford's River Rouge plant. The steel-and-glass structure housed an entire Model T assembly line.

The Decade of the Great Train Stations

Although the automobile was rapidly gaining in popularity, railroad travel still reigned supreme in the 1910s. Heedless of the threat cars posed to the industry, passenger railways built their most ambitious and beautiful railway stations during the decade. Like most civic buildings of the era, train stations were designed in the classical Beaux-Arts style that had been popularized by monumental buildings designed for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and promoted by the firm of McKim, Mead and White and its students.

Pennsylvania Station

The Manhattan station of the Pennsylvania Railroad was the final stage of an ambitious project to eliminate the obligatory ferry ride for Manhattan-bound rail passengers by connecting the Pennsylvania line, William Gibbs McAdoo's Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, and the Long Island Railroad via tunnels under the East River and the Hudson River (opened in 1907). Pennsylvania Station, completed by McKim, Mead and White in 1910, was an American adaptation of the Baths of Caracalla. The surfaces of the structure were finished in porous white travertine stone, a material widely used in Rome but employed for the first time in American architecture. The huge waiting room had a soaring vaulted ceiling supported by granite Corinthian columns that hid 150-foot steel posts. In the train concourse the massive support system was exposed, awing travelers with a massive grid of steel and glass. In 1965 the once-vaunted station was demolished by the railroad, which replaced it with a new building that also housed offices and a new Madison Square Garden.

Grand Central Terminal

The terminal building for the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, completed in 1913, was not as ambitious an architectural undertaking as Pennsylvania Station. Yet from the stand-point of civic engineering, it represented an impressive achievement: the terminal, located at Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, was designed to be integrated into the city around it. Electric train tracks were hidden in tunnels below street level, and Park Avenue was woven around the building so that traffic could continue northward to the new office and apartment buildings planned for the area beyond it. Pedestrian tunnels gave railway passengers access to the sidewalks and the buildings surrounding the terminal. The air rights for the space above the terminal and tracks were leased to commercial developers. In 1929 the New York General Building was erected over the tracks near the terminal, and in 1963 the Pan American (later the MetLife) Building went up above the north end of the terminal. The eighteenth-century French facade of the Grand Central Terminal and its ahistorical concourse were designed by Warren Whitney, an architect in the firm of Warren and Wetmore. His plans echoed those of another monumental building just two blocks west on Forty-second Street, the New York Public Library, designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings and completed two years earlier.

The Late Gothic Revival

The Boston architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson rose to national stature when its Gothic design for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point won a national competition in 1902. Ralph Adams Cram, the son of a Unitarian minister, preferred the spirituality of pre-Reformation Christianity and hoped to bring it to America through Gothic architecture. Cram's firm received several important commissions for churches—including the redesign of St. John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral in New York City in 1911. St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York (1906-1913), which draws on French and English Gothic designs, is thought to be the finest example of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson's work. Were it not for the new-looking pews and plain tile floors, this church, with its asymmetrical stone exterior and strictly Gothic interior, would look at home in Europe—to the un-trained eye. Other Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson buildings are considered by architects to be copies rather than reinterpretations for the twentieth century. For example the Graduate College at Princeton University (1913) has been called a copy of Gothic dining halls in British colleges. Such copies proved popular with American universities. The Harkness Memorial Tower at Yale University, designed by James Gamble Rogers and begun in 1917, is another of the many examples of the so-called collegiate Gothic style.

Eclecticism and Protomodernism

Cram's partner Bertram Goodhue left the firm in 1913 to pursue designs outside the confines of the Gothic revival. He designed the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego in a Spanish style, helping to increase interest in Spanish architecture, particularly in California and along the Gulf Coast. Later, Goodhue created the bulletlike Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln (1916-1928), which presents an unsettling mix of Beaux-Arts formalism and what would become the streamlined style known as Art Deco. Another architect working in a similar mode, Philadelphian Pasul Philippe Cret, attempted to create a more modern, less historical look by omitting ornamentation from Beaux-Arts buildings. His Indianapolis Public Library (1914), with its bare stone surfaces, demonstrates the tomb like qualities of the buildings that resulted from these early efforts to update the Beaux-Arts style.

Sources:

William Dudley Hunt Jr., Encyclopedia of American Architecture, revised by Robert T. Packard and Balthazar Korab (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994);

Marcus Whiffen and Frederick Koeper, American Architecture, 1607—1976 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).