Architectural Styles
I dislike to stray upon the architect’s province, but this subject affects planning so radically, that I will venture to allude to it here, not as advice to architects but as a warning to building committees. In many conditions for competitions and in many discussions among trustees where there happen to be amateurs in architecture on the board, I see directions or hear suggestions about this or that style. To formulate any specific direction to the architect on this point at the outset seems to me a fatal mistake. The style ought to develop from the needs of the particular problem in hand. Until the architect knows just what he has to construct, to prescribe any conventional style only cramps him. Neither practical libraries nor American architecture can be developed by such swaddling clothes. Select an architect who can be regarded as competent and let him choose or create a style without lay dictation, after he comprehends his whole problem. Remember, you are not burying an old style; you are in at the birth of a new one.
“The most noticeable thing about architectural styles is the spontaneity of their growth, developing from the obvious conditions of building.”—Russell Sturgis.[107]
“Having agreed on a good plan, you cannot properly say to the architect, ‘We must have a classical building.’ It is the most difficult of all styles; formal symmetry requiring exceptional skill in the architect.”—W. A. Otis.[108]
Montgomery Schuyler writes, in his article on the “United States,” for Sturgis’s Dictionary of Architecture,[109] “For more than a generation, scarcely a public building was erected which was not at least supposed by its builders to be in the Grecian style. Nothing could have been practically more inconvenient than the requirement that one or more parts of a building divided into offices should be darkened by the projecting portico. In many cases this difficulty was sought to be obviated by converting the central space into a rotunda,—a wasteful arrangement.” Such is an architect’s comment on a feature which has been the librarian’s bête noir.
To quote further from this interesting article:—
“The United States had thus nothing to show in current building but copies of a pure and refined architecture, implicated with dispositions entirely unsuitable to almost all practical requirements.
“Even the most thoughtful of revivalists were apt to take mediæval architecture as a more or less literal model, rather than as a starting point for modern work.
“The later graduates (of the French school) devoted themselves, not to developing an architecture out of American conditions, but to domesticating current French work.”
(By the Chicago World’s Fair) “classic, in one or another of its modes, was re-established as the most eligible style for public buildings. No architect would now think of submitting in competition a design for a public building, in any other style than that officially sanctioned in France.
“There is no longer any pretence of using the selected style as a basis or point of departure to be modified and developed in accordance with American needs and ways of thinking, and with the introduction of new material and new modes of construction.... In civic buildings it may be said as a rule that there is no longer even an aspiration toward a national architecture.”
After discussing at length modern commercial buildings, Mr. Schuyler concludes with a sentence which may well be applied to libraries: “Out of the satisfaction of commonplace and general requirements may arise the beginnings of a national architecture.”
Will there ever be evolved a distinctive library architecture? I hardly think so. It will be possible to recognize a library as you can now tell a schoolhouse; but libraries if well planned will have more individualism, I think, more characteristic charm, than the generality of schoolhouses, but not a uniform architecture.
It is possible indeed that library loveliness will be developed as a recognizable type.