CHAPTER 24 - Notes
[511]. ‘Historicism’ is a clumsy term matched by no viable adjective. It does, however, express more accurately than ‘traditionalism’, ‘revivalism’, or ‘eclecticism’ a certain aspect of architecture which was common throughout the last five hundred years, and not unknown in early ages. Quite simply, it means the re-use of forms borrowed from the architectural styles of the past, usually in more or less new combinations. It is late in this book to introduce a definition; but historicism is always so much taken for granted in discussing the architecture of the nineteenth century that it is only after the appearance as an alternative of exclusive modernism, rejecting all borrowed forms, that the older attitude needs to be isolated in order to discuss its continuance in this century. Characteristically, the architecture of two-thirds of the period covered by this book balanced a moderate sort of modernism with more or less of historicism. This is as true of most of the novel projects of Ledoux in the 1780s as it is of a considerable part of the work of the first generation of modern architects. However, only the traditional architects remained firmly attached to the concept of historicism in the twentieth century; men like Behrens and Perret were, through much of their careers at least, in highly significant revolt against it, quite as Ledoux had been in his day.
[512]. See Östberg, R., The Stockholm Town Hall, Stockholm, 1929.
[513]. The decline is perhaps to be related at its start to the death of their associate Joseph M. Wells in 1890. Never a member of the firm, he had nevertheless been personally responsible for the design of the Villard houses (Plate [109B]) that had opened the academic phase of the firm’s career. Later, the death of White and the retirement of McKim in the early years of the new century removed the two controlling personalities from the firm. Henceforth the office was a ‘plan-factory’, with high professional standards undoubtedly, but without direction other than that already established in the late eighties and nineties by the founders. In 1961 the firm finally came to an end with the death of J. K. Smith, the only surviving partner who had known the founders.
[514]. J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920), a pupil of Gilbert who had worked with Garnier on the Opéra and succeeded Labrouste at the Bibliothèque Nationale, had at least as high a reputation, and was the teacher of several prominent English and American architects. His severe academic style, emulated later by his Anglo-Saxon pupils, was well established by the time he designed the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux in the early nineties. Nénot was one of Pascal’s French pupils.
[515]. William Adams Delano (b. 1874) was a pupil of Laloux; Chester Holmes Aldrich (b. 1878) was also trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. For an attempt to reassess the ‘traditional’ houses of this period, see Lane, J., ‘The Period House in the Nineteen-Twenties’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 185-90.
[516]. The controversy as to which firm should receive credit for the design of the Grand Central Station once waxed hot. The organization of the tremendous complex was probably the work of Charles A. Reed (?-1911) and Allen H. Stem (1856-1931), who had already built other big stations in Troy, N.Y., in 1901-4 and in Tacoma in 1909-11—as, moreover, their successors, Felheimer & Wagner, have done also: Buffalo and North Station, Boston, both begun in 1927, and Cincinnati in 1929-33. Whitney Warren (1864-1943) and Charles D. Wetmore (1866-1941), who also worked with Reed & Stem on the Detroit station completed in 1913, were doubtless more responsible for the dignified and well-scaled detailing. See Marshall, D., Grand Central, New York, 1946.
[517]. Books of the period, such as American Architecture of 1928 by the distinguished architectural historian Fiske Kimball, or American Architecture of Today, also of 1928, by the then Dean of the Harvard University School of Architecture, G. H. Edgell, offer the later writer very little assistance. Kimball in the twenties was too ready to consider the continuance of the academic tradition assured—his chapter on Sullivan and Wright was entitled ‘The Lost Cause’—while Edgell offers such a miscellany of buildings that no clear picture emerges. Several attempts within the period to select its major monuments fixed on much the same lot as are given prominence here; but such selections hardly help to organize the work of the day in historical terms.
[518]. See Weisman, W., ‘Towards a New Environment: the Way of the Price Mechanism; the Rockefeller Centre’, Architectural Review, CVIII (1950), 399-405; ‘Who Designed Rockefeller Center?’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, X (1951), 11-17; and ‘The First “Mature” Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 54-9.
[519]. This firm were the successors of Richardson, and Henry Richardson Shepley, now its head, is Richardson’s grandson. See Forbes, J. D., ‘Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, Architects—An Introduction’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVII (1958), 19-31.
[520]. ‘Compositionalism’ has been suggested by Colin Rowe as a name for the style-phase with which this section deals. Composition was then conceived by many architects and theorists as an absolute to which the re-use of any sort of stylistic forms could be accommodated. It is at least open to suspicion, for example, that Rogers’s Pierson College at Yale was designed originally with Gothic forms and then re-cast as Neo-Georgian. Later eyes than our own will doubtless find it possible to identify the period characteristics of traditional work of the twenties in the way many critics already feel able to do with the nineteenth-century revivals. The period-designation ‘President Harding’ may some day perhaps be as meaningful as ‘General Grant’, if hardly comparable to ‘Victorian’!
[521]. Harvey Wiley Corbett (b. 1873), a pupil of Pascal at the École des Beaux-Arts, was probably the designer.
[522]. Carrère was dead by this time, but the firm name remained unchanged; as has been mentioned earlier, Professor Sir Charles Reilly was consultant, and he probably made some real contribution to the design.
[523]. C.-F. Mewès (1858-1947) and Arthur Joseph Davis (1878-1951), both pupils of Pascal, like Corbett.
[524]. Gropius is very insistent on the desirability of anonymous team-work in architecture. His TAC, the one-time Tecton group in London, and other firms with similar names are examples of this ideal which aims, of course, at something rather different from the anonymity of the large commercial firms. Theirs is fact rather than ideal.
[525]. See Weisman, W., ‘Group Practice’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 145-51.
[526]. Sir John J. Burnet (1857-1938), another pupil of Pascal at the École; Thomas S. Tait (1882-1954).
[527]. See Pevsner, N., ‘Building with Wit; the Architecture of Sir E. Lutyens’, Architectural Review, CX (1951), 217-25.
[528]. See Purdom, C. B., The Garden City, London, 1913; and Culpin, E. G., The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date, London, 1913.
[529]. See Macfadyen, D., Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement, London, 1933.
[530]. See Unwin, R., Town Planning and Modern Architecture at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, 1909.
[531]. Some of the other large buildings were the work of Sir Herbert Baker, who was also responsible for another dominion capital at Pretoria in South Africa. Of his rival’s intervention at New Delhi Lutyens remarked characteristically, ‘It was my Bakerloo’.
[532]. See Drysdale, G., ‘The Work of Leonard Stokes’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XXXIV (1927), 163-77, and Roberts, H. V. M., ‘Leonard Aloysius Stokes’, Architectural Review, C (1946), 173-7.
[533]. The New-Zealand-born Connell’s High-and-Over in Bucks of 1927 is very superior, however, to Tait’s Le Chateau at Silverend in Essex, and a year earlier.