Architecture

Through at least the first three decades of the twentieth century most architects of the western world would have scorned the appellation ‘modern’ or, if they accepted it, would have defined the term very differently from the way it has been understood in the immediately preceding chapters. For twentieth-century architecture that continued the historicism^[511] of the nineteenth century the usual name in English is ‘traditional’. This term reflects a fond presumption that such architecture derives its sanctions from the traditions of the further past, although in fact its only real tradition is that of the preceding hundred years. Whatever one calls it, this traditional architecture includes the majority of buildings designed before 1930 in most countries of the western world and a considerable, if very rapidly decreasing, proportion of those erected since.

Statements of this sort are not very relevant when they concern the arts. In the case of every revolutionary change in architecture the same situation has obtained while the old slowly gave way to the new. Since the modern revolution may well be of the scale of the Renaissance, the student of architectural history should recall that from the early crystallization of the new Italian mode—and at first it was no more than a minor regional mode—in Florence around 1420 to the general acceptance of a new international style throughout Europe some two hundred years passed. The Baroque, in succeeding the Renaissance, came to international dominion only by gradual stages and eventually died out, not all at once around 1750, but gradually over the next half century.

Despite prolific production and the quite remarkable things that were occasionally achieved when historicism came to uneasy terms with new technical means—as had already happened not infrequently in the nineteenth century—the traditional architecture of the twentieth century is primarily an instance of survival; and cultural survivals are among the most difficult problems with which history has to deal. Their sluggish life, sunk in inertia and conservatism, is very different from the vitality of new developments. Yet survivals are tough and resilient, tending always to maintain themselves by their very uneventfulness. Static, not to say smug, assurance is their greatest strength; their greatest danger is that boredom resulting from excessive familiarity which they eventually induce.

Survivals do not generally rouse the interest of posterity. The Gothic of fifteenth-century Italy or that of seventeenth-century England has not received from historians the attention of the rising forces in the architecture of those periods. Somewhat unfairly, late and anachronistic achievements, if admired at all, are likely to be credited to the previous age. In America, for example, Grecian plantation houses built as late as the 1850s are frequently called ‘Southern Colonial’. We are too well aware today, however, that the work of the traditional architects of the last fifty or sixty years is of this century, and not of the previous one, to permit that kind of confusion. The historian must attempt to give some sort of account of things like the Stockholm City Hall (Plate 174A and B) and the Woolworth Building (Plate 178). But the story is not an easy one to tell because it seemed—still at least in the mid twentieth century—to lack plot. The rise of modern architecture, on the other hand, offers material for a dramatic narrative, for it follows the pattern of the ‘success-story’, just as does that of the Gothic in twelfth-century France or the beginnings of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy.

In some areas of the world a meaningful succession of stages can be discerned in the late period of historicism. Because of the differential lags in various parts of the western world, however, it is difficult to find a scheme of organization that is at all generally applicable. All the same, those lags usually mean that certain countries were going through phases of architectural development in the early twentieth century that more advanced areas had left behind before 1900. Since those phases have been discussed in Part Two, it is unnecessary to detail here the peripheral and anachronistic ‘repeats’ of familiar late nineteenth-century episodes in the present century.

Without attempting to round out the picture with the citation of multiple examples, one may at this point suggest some of the aspects, parallel and successive, of twentieth-century historicism. There was, for example, a characteristic continuation of that reaction against the boldness and coarseness of the architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century which is recognizable in most countries, and particularly perhaps in America and England from the eighties; hence the general critical emphasis of the period on ‘restraint’ and on the ‘tasteful’. Academically designed buildings of the 1920s were often still intended to realize aspirations that had been novel some forty years earlier; rarely, however, did they do so with a vitality comparable to that of later nineteenth-century work. So also Gothic of the early twentieth century produced by such American architects as Ralph Adams Cram or James Gamble Rogers hardly differs in its standards from what the English Bodley initiated around 1870.

We have already seen in much of the work of Perret and Behrens a special kind of continuation of the Classical tradition in the twentieth century. This shades down through various degrees and kinds of simplification as represented in the personal modes of such architects as Asplund in Sweden or Marcello Piacentini in Italy to the maintenance of a Classical revivalism as absolute as that of 1800 in white marble temples like Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial in Washington (Plate 180).

The medievalizing currents of the nineteenth century link up with many aspects of the advanced architecture of the early twentieth century. This aftermath, often vital and creative in the fields of theory and of craftsmanship with architects as different as the English Voysey and the Spanish Gaudí, likewise shades down through various levels of decreasing stylization to a literal revivalism that is still in the Victorian tradition, but more in line with that tradition’s early or Puginian phase or its latest Bodleian phase than with the Butterfieldian phase of the 1850s and 1860s.

Both on the Classical and on the Gothic side of the fence, however, there have been a few twentieth-century traditional architects whose personal stylization of borrowed forms was almost as extreme as that of the High Victorians. In their work, intense individualism and limited respect for the canons of ‘taste’ and ‘restraint’ offer real points of contact with the brashness of such modern architects of the first generation as Wright and de Klerk. This is in contrast to the other line of traditionalist integrity in the handling of materials that was solidly based on Gothic Revival standards of revived hand-craftsmanship, one of the truly positive values contributed to the next generation by such architects as Richardson in America and Webb in England. The two lines could also in some milieus combine to produce, particularly in Scandinavia, some of the most impressive works of the early twentieth century. Such an outline, blurred and overlapping in its rubrics, can do little more than suggest some of the principal later channels of the architectural currents which were carried over from the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century.

There is still hardly a country in the world where buildings of traditional design are not being erected; but whatever vitality twentieth-century traditional architecture retained as late as the second and even the third decade of the century had departed by the fourth. Post-mortems on traditional architecture have been many—and often premature. The causes of death are still disputable, but the fact of dissolution is by now generally accepted. Yet the last years of traditional architecture were not completely senile. However much the youthful vitality of the newer architecture attracts sympathy and attention, as late as 1930 its impact on building production was in most countries a very limited one. It is fortunate, therefore, that not all the traditional architecture of the years 1900-30 need be dismissed with scorn, even if the standards by which it must be judged remain those of the nineteenth rather than of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century ended, as we have seen earlier, with a surge of innovation (see Chapters 14, 15, and 16). Looking forward from the late nineties, a prophet might well have assumed that a new architecture would surely arise just beyond the turn of the century; yet within a few years a general reaction set in which took somewhat different forms in various parts of the western world. As has already been noted, there were almost everywhere strong links with the earlier Academic Reaction of the eighties against the bold and brash ‘high styles’ of the mid century; indeed, it may be said that the traditional architecture of the new century was in general both a continuance and a resurgence of that reaction. In most European countries, although not in England and America, the academic architecture of the late nineteenth century had represented little more than a resurgence or a continuance of certain aspects of decadent Romantic Classicism. Seeking a loftier pedigree, however, conservative architects often claimed that they were returning to traditions that had existed down to less than a century before their own day, quite as various reformers from Pugin to Voysey claimed they were renewing a link with one or another earlier period.

Relatively valid as this might still have been for certain aspects of the Queen Anne in England and the Colonial Revival in America, or for the parallel return to eighteenth-century modes in various Continental countries towards the end of the century, this theory had already run into serious difficulties long before 1900. A church might hope to be plausibly Gothic, but a railway station could only be Victorian Gothic; a skyscraper could not even be as Gothic as that. Moreover, the tide of eclecticism that had been rising since the mid eighteenth century was not turned back; for both the reaction of the 1880s and the later reaction of the early 1900s represented chiefly a rejection of earlier nineteenth-century innovations, especially of novel sorts of detail, rather than positive programmes of exclusive revival.

It is possible, at least for individual countries, to make statements concerning what occurred in the field of traditional design between the 1890s and the 1930s that are not wholly without significance. Of Holland it may be said, negatively, that no reaction of consequence towards the traditional occurred before the mid thirties. In Germany the boundary line between what was traditional and what was modern was always fairly vague; yet evidence of a return to stylistic reminiscence after the earliest years of the century is to be found even in the work of leaders of the first generation of modern architects such as Olbrich and Behrens (see Chapter 20). Farther to the North in Denmark and Sweden, the Copenhagen Town Hall of 1892-1902 (Plate 173A) by Martin Nyrop (1849-1923) and the contemporary post offices and fire stations in Stockholm and Malmö by Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1940) resemble Berlage’s Exchange in Amsterdam in their haunting parallelism to the Richardsonian of the eighties in America and even, to some extent, to the Shavian of the seventies in England. It is true that Absalons Gaard, built in 1901-2 by Vilhelm Fischer (1868-1914) in the square in front of Nyrop’s Town Hall, and even more notably the nearby Palace Hotel of 1907-10 by Anton Rosen (1859-1928), developed the freer implications of Nyrop’s manner with an almost Dutch verve. But more characteristically there followed in Scandinavia from about 1900, as elsewhere rather earlier, a programme of tasteful emulation of local versions of the Baroque and then, from shortly after 1910 in Denmark and a decade later in Sweden, an even more programmatic revival of Romantic Classicism.

In the Scandinavian development from 1890 to 1930 there is therefore a sort of ‘plot’ or recognizable sequence of phases despite their overlappings. What has been called ‘National Romanticism’, rooted in the cultural climate of the eighties, had a briefer span in Denmark than in Sweden. Nyrop’s Town Hall, begun in 1892, although in fact hardly more traditional than Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange, introduced the mode, and the Stockholm Town Hall (Plate 174A and B) by Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), completed thirty years later, brought it to a close. But its dominion in Denmark was never exclusive. Although the Custom House of 1897 at Aarhus by Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) with its picturesque high roofs and corner towers belongs to the mode, his Aarhus Theatre of 1898-1900 and his City Library there of 1898-1902 do not. Externally, the theatre is in the main of Early Renaissance design, although with considerable eclecticism in the detail; on the other hand, the library is even less traditional than Nyrop’s Town Hall. Both, moreover, have extremely rich plaster decoration inside that may not improperly be called Art Nouveau.

Wahlman’s Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm, mentioned earlier as an exception to the general dominance of tradition in Scandinavia in these decades, and the Grundvig Church in Copenhagen (Plate 175B) by P. W. Jensen Klint (1853-1930), originally designed in 1913 and completed finally in 1926, are both closely related to the earlier National Romanticism of the eighties and nineties. By the time the latter was designed, however, this phase had for some years been superseded by a sort of Neo-Baroque still also very nationalistic in its choice of precedents and very romantic in their handling. Sometimes, however, this mode approached eighteenth-century revivalism of the sort that flourished in England and America. For example, the Marselisberg Slot, built by Kampmann for the Danish Crown Prince at Aarhus in 1899-1902, is the precise Danish equivalent of the best Neo-Georgian houses of the period in England and America.

Monuments such as the Masthugg Church (Plate 175A) of 1910-14 in Göteborg by Sigfrid Ericson (b. 1874) or the Högalid Church of 1916-23 in Stockholm by Ivar Tengbom (b. 1878) are hardly recognizable as Neo-Baroque to non-Swedish eyes, for they are composed with a sense of visual drama quite equal to Wahlman’s and very stylized in all their detailing. Ericson’s, in particular, has much in common with the American Shingle Style, although that was rarely used for churches and never for big ones of stone or brick construction.

In much secular Swedish work in the Neo-Baroque mode, such as the very typical ASEA Building of 1916-19 in Västeros by Erik Hahr (1869-1944), bold asymmetrical massing and onion-domed towers reflect the romanticism of the churches and also recall early stages of the revived Queen Anne in England in the seventies. Danish taste in the second decade of the century was much more severe than Swedish, as in fact it had always been, and the characteristic low-cost housing blocks in Copenhagen of this period, such as those of 1914 in the Amagertorv by Hansen & Hygom, are, so to say, only Neo-Baroque round the edges.

For the 1920s, however, the most significant phase was the third, that is the return to Romantic Classicism. This was initiated in Denmark by Carl Petersen (1874-1923) in his Faaborg Museum designed in 1912, and reached its climax immediately after the First World War. In Sweden the parallel phase began a bit later. By the time such men as Fisker in Denmark, Asplund in Sweden, and Aalto in Finland became ‘converts’ to the International Style in the late twenties, Scandinavian traditionalism had become almost as purged of stylistic detail as the architecture of Tony Garnier, or even that of Adolf Loos, had been for a generation.

On the whole the Danes and the Swedes produced the most lively and distinguished traditional architecture of the early decades of the century. Medievalizing churches in Scandinavia, such as the just-mentioned Grundvig Church in Copenhagen, where Jensen Klint followed Baltic modes that seemed strange and even Expressionist to foreign eyes, or Tengbom’s Högalid Church in Stockholm, superbly sited and actually much more Baroque than Gothic in its detail, make the respectable Neo-Perpendicular and Neo-Georgian exercises of contemporary Anglo-Saxon architects look timid and unimaginative. In both cases it is the stylization of proportion—the tremendous verticality—that makes them striking and full of a sort of vitality, at once nervous and lusty, which is comparable to that of the best High Victorian Gothic churches.

The finest medievalizing work is undoubtedly Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall of 1909-23.^[512] This is an exceedingly eclectic combination of elements adapted from various periods both of the Swedish and the general European past. Superbly set at the water’s edge, it is sumptuously decorated inside and out with products of craftsmanship that are of a very high order of competence (Plate 174A and B). Despite his eclecticism, Östberg succeeded in imposing on all his disparate elements a high degree of personal stylization at the same time that he exploited the situation with marvellous dramatic effect. There is also a witty allusiveness suggesting the art of the theatre and the exotic fantasies of the late eighteenth century. The Stockholm Town Hall provides a sort of pageant-setting for the ceremonial life of the city, recalling the splendours of town-hall architecture of many epochs of the past, even though it lacks the straightforwardness and the integrity of Nyrop’s earlier Town Hall in Copenhagen.

The outside world had hardly had time to apprehend such new Scandinavian building in the years following the First World War before it became evident that architecture in these countries, hitherto on the whole in stylistic retard of developments elsewhere by almost a generation, had taken a surprisingly sharp turn. Petersen’s museum at Faaborg followed the local Romantic Classical models of C. F. Hansen far more literally than any of the contemporary admirers of Schinkel in Germany were doing. Brought to completion in 1916 during the First World War, it attracted very little foreign attention at the time it was built. But the Police Headquarters in Copenhagen by Kampmann, erected after the war in 1918-22, with its great colonnaded circular court, and the Øregaard School (Plate 176B) at 32 Gersonsvej in the Gentofte Kommune north of Copenhagen by Edward Thomsen (b. 1884) and G. B. Hagen (1873-1941) that followed in 1922-4 were at once noticed abroad. Both indeed are notable for their grandeur and for their simplicity, the latter realizing old Romantic Classical ideals with extraordinary success, the former coming closer to the academic work of McKim, Mead & White in America.

Still simpler, and not without a similar sort of understated grandeur surprising in such work, were the Danish low-cost housing blocks erected in the early twenties in succession to those of Hansen & Hygom. Those by Povl Baumann (b. 1878) in the Hans Tavsengade or the enormous Hornsbaekhus of 1923 by Kay Fisker (b. 1893), all in Copenhagen, are especially fine. The extreme precision, the elegant craftsmanship in brick, and the ascetic detailing of these blocks of flats, rivalling the contemporary ones by de Klerk and by Kramer in Amsterdam in quality but subscribing to a quite opposed aesthetic, are found also in many Danish private houses of the twenties built by Gotfred Tvede (1863-1947) and other architects both in the city and in the country.

Although Carl Westmann (1866-1936) in the Röhss Museum of Handicraft at Göteborg and Erik Lallerstedt (1864-1955) in the University of Architecture and Engineering at Stockholm approached the simplicity and fine craftsmanship in brick of the Danes, Swedish work of this period was in general richer and more robust, still reflecting the very eclectic sources of inspiration of Östberg’s Town Hall. However, in 1923 Neo-Classicism of a more attenuated and whimsical order than Petersen’s made a striking appearance in the buildings for the Göteborg Jubilee Exhibition. Of these the Congress Hall by Arvid Bjerke (b. 1880), with its serried clerestories carried on arched principals, was the boldest and least reminiscent. These Göteborg pavilions were very influential abroad in the mid and late twenties; detailing of Swedish inspiration then seemed to offer to traditional designers elsewhere a sort of Nordic spice with which to enliven the dead-level of the local eighteenth-century revivals.

Tengbom, deserting the romantic eclecticism and the emotional drama of his earlier Högalid Church, used a highly stylized, almost exposition-like, Neo-Classic mode for his Stockholm Concert Hall of 1920-6. However, the climax in Sweden—if not, indeed, the climax as regards all Scandinavia—came with Asplund’s Central Library in Stockholm, begun in 1921 and much simplified and refined as construction proceeded through the mid twenties. Rejecting the frivolous decorative detail of his Skandia Cinema of 1922-3, Asplund rivalled the Danes in reducing architecture to geometrical simplicity (Plate 176A). Thus he might almost seem to have passed beyond C. F. Hansen and Schinkel, the Scandinavian idols of the day, to draw the inspiration for his plain cylinder rising out of a cube directly from Ledoux or Boullée (Plate 2A); while at the base he ran a continuous band of windows derived from the newest architecture of these years in France, Germany, and Holland. This juxtaposition in the same edifice of Ledoux and Le Corbusier, so to put it, is rather awkward; but it is highly symptomatic of the very slight step that the Scandinavians had still to take in the late twenties when they gave up revived Romantic Classicism—already pared down to basic geometry in this library and in much Danish housing—to become outright converts to the International Style.

Although Sweden and Denmark produced no modern architect of the first generation of such individual distinction as the Finnish Saarinen, and must in any case be considered to have started out around 1900 from a position somewhat in retard of the French and the Germans, their early twentieth-century architecture largely avoided the stasis of traditionalism elsewhere, moving through overlapping but discrete phases to an early and sympathetic acceptance of the new international architecture of the twenties even before that decade was over. So clear a picture is hard to discern in most other countries.

In the United States the pattern of development between the 1890s and the 1930s, in so far as one can make out any pattern at all, was quite different; nor was there in America, in the way of England in the twenties, any Swedish influence of consequence. Movements roughly equivalent to the Scandinavian National Romanticism of 1900, the Richardsonian Romanesque and the Shingle Style, had flourished in the eighties and come to an end by 1900. The Academic Reaction that early succeeded them swept on, however, for some forty years. Despite the ruling eclecticism of taste that permitted an archaeological sort of revived Gothic still to thrive as a mode for churches and educational institutions, the more widely favoured Classical, Renaissance, and Georgian stylisms had all been initiated by McKim, Mead & White in the eighties and early nineties. The quality of their work began to decline^[513] almost as soon as their professional primacy became assured; yet their best buildings of the first decade of the new century undoubtedly remain among the most competent, if unexciting, examples of traditional architecture then produced anywhere. Americans, not Frenchmen, were in these decades the worthiest products of the École des Beaux-Arts, and thus heirs of the strongest academic tradition in the world.

Whether McKim, Mead & White’s models be Renaissance, as in the University Club in New York (Plate 179) completed in 1900, the series of Branch Public Libraries there that were built over the next dozen years, and the Tiffany Building finished in 1906; or Classical, as in the Knickerbocker Trust in New York and the Bank of Montreal in Montreal, both completed in 1904, the very similar Girard Trust in Philadelphia of 1908, and the vast Pennsylvania Station in New York of 1906-10, this New York firm was clearly one of the truest successors to the nineteenth-century academic heritage that so many of the French were frittering away at the opening of the new century in a half-hearted flirtation with the Art Nouveau.

The Gare d’Orsay in Paris of 1898-1900 (Plate 183A) by V.-A.-F. Laloux (1856-1937) is no more to be compared with the Americans’ station than his Hôtel de Ville at Tours of 1904-5 with their clubs and banks—his best work, closer to the tradition of Duquesney and Hittorff, was an earlier station, that at Tours of 1895-8. Yet Laloux was often considered the most accomplished French traditional architect of the period.^[514] Moreover, the McKim, Mead & White repertory of stylistic modes was wide: much wider than that of the French, although Laloux did produce in Saint-Martin at Tours, completed in 1904, a domed basilica still in the line of the earlier French Romanesquoid churches, though not at all of the quality of Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge of the sixties.

McKim, Mead & White exploited a vernacular Colonial Revival, as in the E. D. Morgan house of 1900 at Wheatley Hills, Long Island, as well as a more formal Neo-Georgian, at which several others, such as Delano & Aldrich^[515] and Charles A. Platt (1861-1933), were quite as competent as they. But they could also shade their Classicism towards the Byzantine, as in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York completed in 1906, or adapt it to industrial uses, as in the I.R.T. Power Station in New York of 1903. They could even extend it upward into skyscrapers, as in the New York Municipal Building completed in 1908, concentrating all their attention on the ground floor and the crowning feature while ignoring the many-storeyed shank between; or spread it thin over large apartment houses such as that they built in 1918 at 998 Fifth Avenue, one of the best examples of the apparently solid blocks that walled one side of that thoroughfare above 57th Street facing Central Park and soon turned Park Avenue from 46th to 96th Street into a man-made canyon. The one thing they and their contemporaries seemed to be unable to do was to make their architecture live, even with the derivative vitality of the Scandinavians. Frozen ideals of stylistic ‘correctness’ stifled such expression of individual personality as gives real character to the work of a Tengbom or a Kampmann even when it comes closest to theirs.

In popular estimation certain buildings that made use of Gothic rather than Classical, Renaissance, or Georgian forms had a higher reputation. Cass Gilbert’s already-mentioned Woolworth Building finished in 1913 (Plate 178) initiated a considerable range of Gothic skyscrapers, including Howells & Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower of 1923-5, but it remains in the judgement of posterity the most notable example of this sort of applied medieval design. Despite the considerable acclaim it received when new, such an equally characteristic Romanesquoid example as the Shelton Hotel of 1929 by Arthur Loomis Harmon (b. 1901) rivals Gilbert’s no more in interest than in height. The New York Telephone Company Building, completed in 1926 by Ralph Walker (b. 1889) at the beginning of his career with the firm of McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin, is more original. Its fortress-like masses, somewhat frivolously relieved by ornamental touches borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925, and its isolated location at the Hudson River’s edge, ensure that its bold silhouette will long vie, for the visitor arriving from abroad, with the so much taller and richer silhouette of the Woolworth Building. Most of the other individual big buildings of the twenties in New York and other large American cities are no more than incidental elements in the man-made mountain ranges of their skylines.

Curiously enough the ‘correct’ Gothic churches of this period do not receive today as favourable a response as the large-scale medievalizing secular work that is necessarily so very unlike real work of the Middle Ages. Those of Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), then the most esteemed Gothic practitioner, are lifeless and even crude beside Bodley’s and Pearson’s in England from which they largely derive. His first church, All Saints’, Ashmont, outside Boston which was built in 1892 is by its early date the least anachronistic. Cram’s former partner Goodhue’s St. Vincent Ferrer in New York completed in 1916, a competent and well-scaled example of Late Gothic that is more Continental than English in character, is rather more successful than any of their joint work or that which Cram did later with his other partner Ferguson. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924), responsible also, as has been noted, for the Spanish Colonial revival in California, moved on in the early twenties just before his death to an eclectic sort of semi-modernism best represented by his Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. This is vaguely Byzantinesque, yet towered instead of being domed in what had been the tradition for state capitals ever since Bulfinch’s in Boston. His contemporary Los Angeles Public Library is starker and more like a project by Tony Garnier.

There were other architects to match McKim, Mead & White directly at their own academic exercises: most notably John Russell Pope (1874-1937), with his Temple of Scottish Rite in Washington completed in 1916, a grandiose reconstruction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; and Henry Bacon (1866-1924), with his Lincoln Memorial completed the following year (Plate 180). The latter is a peripteral Greek Doric temple of white marble with a high attic that might almost have been designed in Paris in the 1780s—no mean compliment. Equally French in spirit, but with no such evident prototypes, is the Grand Central Station in New York, built in 1903-13 by Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore.^[516] More efficiently organized than the Pennsylvania Station, its concourse is one of the grandest spaces the early twentieth century ever enclosed (Plate 177B).

Compared to most work of these decades by French architects, all trained like the American leaders at the École des Beaux-Arts, the greater ‘correctness’ of the detailing of these buildings is notable. The boast of ‘good taste’ was not altogether a hollow one, although it is at best a negative rather than a positive criterion for architecture.

So extensive was American building production during the twenties that it is difficult to know how to epitomize it.^[517] On the one hand, there are the later skyscrapers, essaying new stylistic garments as the older ones lost their piquancy. Even before the Romanesquoid of Harmon’s Shelton Hotel had come the massive simplicity of Walker’s Telephone Building. But for all the playing around with superficially novel decoration borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925 in the succeeding years, there was no basic renewal of form before next decade opened. Just after the crash of 1929 terminated the boom, the second skyscraper age came to a belated close with the erection in the early thirties of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building and the initiation of the Rockefeller Center project.^[518] There a more urbanistic grouping, extending over a considerable area, replaced the earlier ideal of building single structures of ever greater height that had just reached its climax with the Empire State Building. This change in approach, recognized ever since as a turning point, was for a long time hardly at all followed up. However, the spaced skyscrapers of Pittsburgh’s rebuilt Golden Triangle and, since then, various projects of urban renewal for big and middle-sized cities from coast to coast are shifting the emphasis from individual structures to the wholesale reorganization of very large areas (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).

In the terms of this chapter neither the Empire State Building nor Rockefeller Center are examples of traditional architecture, even if it is hardly proper to consider them ‘modern’ in the sense of the European architecture of their day. Although likewise no example of the new architecture as then understood in Europe like Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of 1932 (Plate 169), such a clean-cut skyscraper as Hood’s vertically striped Daily News Building in New York marked with more distinction than its outsize rivals the end of traditional design in this field.

Almost as remarkable as the skyscrapers of the twenties in size and elaboration were the groups of new buildings in which so many academic institutions, both new and old, variously housed themselves. The mode is Classical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built by Welles Bosworth (b. 1869) in 1912-15 on the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; ‘Georgian-Colonial’ in the range of ‘Houses’ that Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott^[519] built in the twenties for Harvard, also along the Charles River in Cambridge; it is Gothic at Cram & Ferguson’s Graduate College at Princeton, N.J. (Plate 177A) completed in 1913, in the Harkness Quadrangle, designed in 1917, and other later buildings for Yale at New Haven, Conn., by James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947), and at the Men’s Campus by Horace Trumbauer (1869-1938) at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; it is even, by exception, Byzantinoid at Cram’s Rice Institute at Houston, Texas, opened in 1912. The usual modes for such work were what was known as ‘Collegiate’ Gothic, based rather loosely on work at Oxford and Cambridge that was quite as likely to be nineteenth-century as medieval in date, and Neo-Georgian in an Anglo-American version, usually too grand to be plausibly Colonial yet too casually composed to be properly Anglo-Palladian. Curiously enough, the Gothic Cram’s Neo-Georgian Sweet Briar College in Virginia of 1901-6 is more successful than much of his own medievalizing work or than comparable work by those who specialized in eighteenth-century design.

The technical competence of American architects in this period was very great, the sums of money available almost unlimited, and the avowed standards of design only the vague ones of ‘taste’ and ‘correctness’, by this time little more than a schoolmasterish respect for precedent in detail, though rarely in over-all composition.^[520] Far less than in Scandinavia is it possible to define the particular ways in which the period expressed itself, for express itself America in these decades undoubtedly did. Yet, when Americans of this period worked abroad, what they produced is readily distinguishable from the work of local traditionalists. The American Academy on the Gianicolo in Rome, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1913, has a certain chaste precision in its High Renaissance detailing no Italian could then have achieved even if he had wanted to. In London Helmle & Corbett’s^[521] Bush House, rising between the Strand and Aldwych, has a clarity of form and a sense of urbanistic responsibility that few comparable buildings of its period designed by leading British architects display; up to a point, the same is true of Carrère & Hastings’s^[522] Devonshire House in Piccadilly of 1924-6. The Ritz Hotel of 1906 across the street by the Anglo-French firm of Mewès & Davis,^[523] both of them trained at the École des Beaux-Arts as was Thomas Hastings, is bolder in scale, less priggish, but it also lacks the suavity and finish of its neighbour. Bolder also, indeed too monumental for its size, is Barclays Bank of 1926 by W. Curtis Green (b. 1875), near by in Piccadilly across Arlington Street. Of more nearly comparable quality is Green’s earlier Westminster Bank of 1922-3 on the north side of Piccadilly.

Somewhere between the extreme professional competence of the traditional architects of America, a competence almost wholly anonymous in its results, and the intensely personal expression of the Scandinavians lies the pattern that the best traditional architecture, such as Green’s, followed in England in the early twentieth century. But before turning to that a good deal more should first be said concerning both the competence and the anonymity of American production, since that competence and even that anonymity came to be accepted throughout the western world as desirable^[524] characteristics of modern architecture by a great many architects, at least in the mid century.

Partnerships were not unknown in the nineteenth century, although professional alliances between strong personalities rarely lasted for long. When the partner was not an equal the historian is often justified in writing, say, of G. G. Scott and forgetting Moffatt or, with rather less justification, only of Sullivan while ignoring Adler. But architectural firms that include three or more named partners, with still other members listed only on the letter-head; others such as D. H. Burnham and Company and Albert Kahn Incorporated, or ‘partnerships’, such as McKim, Mead & White or Cram & Ferguson, which continued to function under the same name for decades after the death of the original partners like so many firms of lawyers: these are more or less peculiar to the twentieth century and first became common in the United States. Today, moreover, an architect of European background like Mies van der Rohe does not undertake large-scale operations in America, such as the group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology or a fortiori his tall blocks of flats in Chicago and the Seagram skyscraper in New York, without associating himself with such large local firms. Wright and Gropius solved the problem somewhat differently; but the Taliesin Fellowship and TAC provided them respectively with the relatively modest and idiosyncratic equivalents of the organization of the big Harrison & Abramowitz firm in New York or of one of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon.

The development of the characteristic large-scale American architectural office seems to have begun in Chicago. Burnham, on the death of his designing partner Root in 1891, just after they had undertaken the primary responsibility for the general planning and building of the World’s Fair of 1893, had to set up an organization of which he was no more than the executive head. But the office of McKim, his closest associate in carrying out the Fair, was certainly already far advanced along a parallel road. There is a definite connexion here also with the rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’.

The same is even more true of industrial work. Here Albert Kahn took the lead around 1905 in developing a type of subdivision and flow of work in his office in Detroit comparable to the new methods of mass-production that his motor-car factories were specifically designed to facilitate. Such patterns are found at their extreme in the group^[525] of firms that together produced Rockefeller Center, in the Harrison & Abramowitz office which is in effect their heir, and in the largely post-war expansion of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Abroad, more characteristically, such organizations have been built up in offices under a public authority such as those of the London and the Hertfordshire County Councils, the City Architects’ Offices in various German cities, or the Banco Obrero housing agency in Venezuela.

‘Plan-factories’ are undoubtedly conducive to speed and to a certain sort of competence in the execution of large projects, but it must be evident that the architecture they produce will necessarily be anonymous. In defining the character of their competence, moreover, one must be careful not to imply too much. Only such team-work, perhaps, can organize the logistics of building production in such a way that extensive and ramified ventures are carried rapidly to completion, a desideratum of the first order in a boom period for skyscrapers that must be finished quickly in order to begin repaying their enormous cost. Efficiency is of a different sort of consequence where large-scale building schemes of a more public and social nature are being undertaken, but none the less extremely important. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles, produced without an elaborate office organization, took some six years to build; as a result it was no longer ‘low-cost housing’ when it was finally completed.

Yet competence in the sections of a big office that deal with the plumbing, say, or the electrical system is no assurance that the quite different sort of competence required in the design department will be available. Moreover, a brilliant initial design may or may not survive intact the various modifications that other departments bring to it as the preparatory paper-work for the building moves through successive stages to ultimate execution. At best, even when a particular designer’s name is associated with a particular building, as is that of Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Lever House (Plate 189), his responsibility is of a very different order from Wright’s for the Price Tower-although not perhaps so different from Mies’s for the Seagram skyscraper.

The situation in England in the first third of the century was rather different from that in America despite a nineteenth-century inheritance which was in many aspects common to both countries. One architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, had a personal capacity for invention along traditional lines superior to that of any American of his generation. This was not, however, of the order of individualistic intensity of an Östberg or a Jensen Klint, nor was he able, in the way of an Asplund or even a Hood, to accept around 1930 the discipline of the newer architecture of the day. Lutyens built no skyscrapers, nor did he develop the sort of office organization that made them possible in America. This was, however, occurring to some extent by the twenties and thirties in other big English offices, such as those of Sir John Burnet & Tait^[526] and of Curtis Green.

All the same, it fell to Lutyens’s lot to build some of the biggest business structures erected anywhere outside America in these years, and his career culminated in the design and construction of an imperial capital such as came the way of no American. His competence was of a more nineteenth-century order than that of the Americans, and there was certainly nothing anonymous about his work. He was, moreover, still an inspiriting figure in an England where architecture, under the difficult economic conditions since the last war, tended to become anonymous without becoming especially competent, except for public housing and for schools (see Chapter 25).

Lutyens’s beginnings were very remote from the world of business and governmental buildings with which his career wound up (see Chapter 15). Very early houses, such as Ruckmans of 1894 at Oakwood Park or Sullingstead of 1896 at Hascombe, both in Surrey, followed directly in the line of Shaw’s Surrey manor-houses with their tile-hung walls, free and easy composition, and simple domesticity of tone. They are, indeed, superior to most of Shaw’s—the first of which, Glen Andred, was built almost thirty years earlier and the last about this time—because of Lutyens’s respect for Webb and the resultant superiority of his craftsmanship. In his finest early houses, such as Deanery Gardens at Sonning of 1901 (Plate 182B), he rivalled Voysey. He was already inclined, however, like Webb in many of his later houses, to use considerable stylistic detail, usually Neo-Georgian, in his interiors, and here and there on exteriors as well.

Perhaps the revolution—or counter-revolution—in his development represented by his Heathcote of 1906 at Ilkley in Yorkshire has been somewhat exaggerated. Yet the design of this, completely symmetrical and quite elaborately Palladian in detail, did represent as great a shift in approach, taken in one jump, as that from Shaw’s Glen Andred of the late sixties to his Chesters of the early nineties. It was, however, practically the same shift. Eclectic like almost all the traditional architects of his generation, Lutyens still occasionally remodelled medieval houses, but the main line of his development henceforth was certainly Neo-Georgian. Yet it was usually Neo-Georgian with an important difference from what had become by this time in England as in America a rather drearily codified mode. Nashdom at Taplow in Buckinghamshire, built in 1909, is a vast white-painted house, plain, regular, massive, and hardly at all archaeological. Yet this is so handsomely proportioned and so well built that one could well believe it to be the result of some generations-long process of accretion in the eighteenth century. Great Maytham in Kent of 1910 is Queen Anne, but not the Queen Anne of the 1870s. Here a great mansion of the early eighteenth century was re-created with such a plausibility of craftsmanship that after only half a century it was hard to believe it was not two hundred and fifty years old. A somewhat smaller house, the Salutation at Sandwich of 1912, is similar and perhaps even more remarkable as an example of what is almost ‘productive archaeology’ on the part of a man who was not, in fact, at all archaeologically minded. Such houses are the twentieth-century equivalents of Devey’s in the nineteenth century, but they often have a witty originality in the handling of traditional detail that has aptly been called ‘naughty’ and is peculiarly personal to Lutyens.^[527]

If the Georgian had to be revived in the way of the Greek and the Gothic, it could hardly have been done with more competence and more animation; certainly the Americans of Lutyens’s generation rarely excelled so notably in this particular field, although many of the once highly esteemed firms mentioned earlier positively specialized in it. Beside these houses of Lutyens, the Neo-Georgian of the Shepley firm’s Harvard Houses or Cram’s Sweet Briar College is merely routine. Yet in such work Lutyens was still only a country-house architect.

Before discussing Lutyens’s work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with which his association began in 1908, something should be said concerning the ‘Garden City’ movement^[528] in general. In 1892 Ebenezer Howard^[529] (1850-1928) published Tomorrow. A Peaceful Path to Reform, better known by the title of the edition of 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Howard’s opportunity to realize his aspirations for a new sort of town began with the acquisition of land at Letchworth in 1903, but the construction of the Letchworth Garden City on the plans of Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) and his partner Richard Barry Parker actually post-dates their work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb. They had, however, already laid out a ‘model village’ for a chocolate manufacturer at New Earswick near York in 1904.

In 1907 Dame Henrietta Barnett set out to realize some aspects of the Garden City ideal on the outskirts of London. The next year land was acquired near Golders Green on the far side of Hampstead Heath and the suburb planned as a whole by Parker & Unwin.^[530] Lutyens was invited to plan and design the group of public buildings in the centre and their immediate setting (Figure 54). This town centre was eventually largely completed, most of it from Lutyens’s design, and the two churches, with the contiguous squares, provide some of his finest work. His work here certainly set a pace of coherence and urbanity that was unfortunately not maintained in later Garden Cities such as Welwyn, begun in 1919, that followed the rather more diffuse plan of Letchworth.

Welwyn, however, is of importance in the history of town-planning because it was not merely a residential development but included from the first an industrial estate as well. Thus it was a more complete entity and the prototype of the English ‘New Towns’ initiated after the Second World War. The Barnett project was originally, and has remained, an upper-middle-class suburb; yet it is unique for the orderliness and the distinction of the public buildings that Lutyens provided at the centre and the terrace-framed squares that flank them.

St Jude’s, the Anglican church, begun in 1910 and not finally completed at the west end until 1933, is Lutyens’s principal ecclesiastical work, his Catholic cathedral in Liverpool having been barely begun before his death. Lacking the emotional drama of the Scandinavian churches of its period, St Jude’s has nevertheless a certain real boldness of silhouette, produced by rather eclectic means, and an elegance of craftsmanship in the brickwork that is in the finest tradition of the Gothic Revival. Yet, being by Lutyens, it is hardly at all medieval. The tall crossing tower may have slight suggestions of the Norman in its detailing and a cathedral-like scale, but in general the exterior is in a vaguely seventeenth-century vernacular descending from the later work of Shaw and Webb.