Balbus; or, the future of architecture

by Christian Augustus Barman

To fashion, to gather; but at whose command? It is not for the architect to decide what cells there shall be; cells of what size, dedicated to what purpose, combined in what numbers. The architect is a servant only, and these things are the business of his master. It is when the master fails to attend to them that we get a building without a content, without a soul: a building that is admitted to the realm of architecture only on sufferance, since there is nothing to give its cells any particular shape, or to suggest or enforce any particular disposition of these cells. This is the typical building of to-day and to-morrow, and among the various agencies that have helped to bring it forth the freedom of modern woman is certainly the first, and is probably the most important also. There are, in addition, several causes of social instability that affect architecture in one way or another, and each of them helps to render modern building more uncertain, more indeterminate, or, as a biologist might say, more clearly lacking in morphological differentiation. On the formal side also (as contrasted with the functional) two lesser influences may be noted in passing. One is that astonishing manifestation of anti-æsthetic enthusiasm which has continued in more than one guise ever since the beginning of civilized society, but which to-day gains an added strength in that it has its source in the very stronghold of art itself. It is to be feared that Marinetti’s advice to use the altar of art as a spittoon has not been altogether neglected by architects, though their fellow artists may have taken it rather more deeply to heart. The other external influence is more subtle but no less active. It has been pointed out that only in a plan can the chief virtues of great architecture be adequately represented. It is a significant fact that the chief vehicle of architectural information to-day, the most popular means of recording architectural excellence, is the photograph, not the plan, of which it is the direct opposite. The photograph expresses all that the plan leaves unsaid; it ignores all save a small remnant of the major qualities registered in the plan, and this remnant it twists and falsifies to a degree which renders its testimony worse than valueless. We have still to be shown the photograph that, representing the interior of a room, will convey a modicum of reliable information concerning the shape of that room. For in looking at a room through a photograph we are, be it remembered, looking at it through a small hole in a box. These two factors then have, in so far as they enter into contact with architectural form, been clearly disruptive in their effect, but the influence which must next engage our attention is an incomparably deeper one.

It is exactly half a century since the feminist movement began upon the career whose triumphant finish coincided with the great Peace of Versailles. There was in this country no feminist agitation worth speaking of, until the signal was given by the Reform Bill of 1876. In the very same year the late John Wanamaker, who had for some time been in business in Philadelphia as a dealer in men’s and boys’ clothing, discovered that women seemed prepared to do a certain amount of shopping on their own account. He opened a new department, which became the foundation of his later successes. Where men had walked rapidly in and out, mindful only of the tie or the pair of boots they had come to buy, a long procession of women wound its way from counter to counter, dismayed by the many omissions in their shopping list, and grateful to find how easily these omissions were to be repaired. The small band of women workers marching to victory was followed by an army of shoppers a hundred times more numerous, and of such energy and enterprise that men’s clothing departments were everywhere incorporated into their already extensive domain. The allegiance of the whole body of women must have been coveted for some time, for even in the early years of the nineteenth century the big west-end drapers would clothe an eligible debutante in their choicest productions, generously relying upon her to find a husband who could afford to pay her bills. But though the bait was ready, its opportunity had still to be found, and when the feminist movement at last provided it the large drapers’ store leapt forward, and the two revolutions went on together in a simultaneous advance. The first act of public violence was committed by the adherents of feminism in 1909, and as the stones went crashing through the windows of the Government offices in Whitehall, the newly erected windows of Mr. Gordon Selfridge became the cynosure of the more pacific among feminine eyes. It will be necessary later on to consider the influence of modern woman from other angles of view, but we may be sure that from none of these has it been more potent or more remarkable, for as a consumer of wealth she is transforming the design of our buildings more thoroughly than is clear even to-day.

Very few years elapse before the large new drapery store assumes the characteristic form that will gradually impose itself upon many of our other buildings. It is realized almost at once that no external wall must cut off the ground floor of the building from the pavement of the street, for the business can only succeed if the undreamt-of collection of goods is amply and seductively displayed to the feminine passer-by. For some time experiments were made (notably by the Leonhard Tietz stores in Germany) with buildings clothed in glass from top to bottom, but, though German architects are still toying with the idea, the familiar stretches of undivided glass are nowadays applied to the ground floor only. Inside the buildings, however, no walls are wanted at any point, on any of the floors, and there we find large open spaces offering no obstruction to the view, and allowing counters and show-cases to be moved backwards and forwards with the capricious tides of fashion. No longer is the building composed of an expressive sequence of definitely formed cavities; there is only layer upon layer of formless space, tier upon tier of vacant sites, along which the hundred specialized departments may pitch their glittering booths. It no more resembles a piece of major architecture than does a market-place covered with awnings and sunshades. It has become, in fact, a flight of hanging market-places piled one upon the other, rising high into the air, and delving many yards into the ground.

The constituent parts of this type of building are fourfold. There are the floors themselves; and there are the props necessary to support these floors. There is the covering, opaque or transparent, in which the top and sides are wrapped to protect the contents from the weather. Lastly, there is the private road which runs through the building from top to bottom. This road belongs to the modern composite type about which a little more still requires to be said. Let us here but observe that, reared on end and pointing upward, it allows visitors to ride or walk from one level to another, while at the same time it contains within itself the numerous pipes and conduits through which water, heat and electrical energy are delivered to each floor, and the sewage carried away from it and discharged into the public drain.

Part of a modern commercial building, divested of its outer wall curtain and with the supporting metal framework removed. The U-shaped floor-platforms are, as it were, threaded on the vertical road, in which are contained the lifts and stairways and the various kinds of conduits. (Woolworth Building, New York, by Cass Gilbert.)