Balbus; or, the future of architecture

by Christian Augustus Barman

The new eviscerated architecture, once invented by the builder of the drapery store for his regiments of feminine customers, did not take long to gain a very considerable following. Indeed, it could not have had a more auspicious place of origin. As the bee carries the pollen from flower to flower, so the no less indefatigable draper carried the seeds of this architecture into the streets of every town of importance. We need only remind ourselves of the manner in which he is pressing forward to-day in the West End of London, transmuting with golden wand the whole of Regent Street, large portions of Oxford Street, and a great deal of Kensington and Bayswater, into something very rich and, as I have tried to show, not a little strange. Richest of all, perhaps, is the colonnade in Oxford Street whose relation to the rest of London is the relation between the majestic bulk of a transatlantic liner and the diminutive proportions of the fleet of tugboats that surrounds her. The modern drapery store is as large as it is ubiquitous, and its wealth and power are consonant with these outward signs of importance. The Wanamaker store, of which I have already spoken, provides an interesting example of the eminence to which these establishments have to-day attained. Everybody is aware of the interest displayed by publications such as the Daily Mail in the building and equipment of the suburban home, an interest which it would appear not unprofitable for them to indulge. The New York Wanamaker store, however, opened in October, 1925, a great and fascinating exhibition devoted exclusively to the future development of the city of New York. The first, to my knowledge, of its kind to be held anywhere, such an exhibition argues a sense of responsibility, a foresight, courage and public spirit that would be hard to parallel in any kind of business. Most of all, of course, it points to a very considerable degree of affluence, for the exhibition itself was accompanied by a wide and intensive publicity campaign in the New York Press. A commercial house that can afford to take such pains towards the popularizing of architectural and town-planning development schemes may claim to be a fairly important institution and an opulent patron of the arts. Both the importance and the opulence have been conferred upon the drapery store by the emancipated women of to-day.

The possibilities of open-floor design for all kinds of building were, then, abundantly exhibited and widely perceived. From shop and factory the new device spread to the office block, whose claim to be in the modern movement is not usually admitted unless it consists of the same succession of shelf-like floors suspended round a central road. Schools and universities have already subscribed to the principle of unformed and undivided space. An appeal recently issued on behalf of the University of Pittsburg opens with the statement that 14,460,000 cubic feet of space are required for the University to discharge its normal functions. I cannot forbear to mention that one of the objects of the new buildings is (so the appeal goes on to tell us) to commemorate “the achievers of Pittsburg” and to testify to their “records of tonnage production.” The idea of perpetuating Pittsburg tonnage production in 14,460,000 cubic feet of University is not without a pleasing logic of its own.

And what of the house and home? Are we to meet there, too, with the same undefined vacuity, the same absence of internal form? Already a Dutch architect has built a house with nothing inside its four outer walls except an upper floor to which an open stairway gives access. The upper and lower floors are subdivided by means of movable screens, which enable the owner to arrange his rooms according to the fancy of the moment, and, I suppose, to adjust his houseroom to the measure of his hospitality. This is, of course, how houses are mostly constructed in Japan, but it should be remembered that, though the Japanese house is built entirely without walls, whether internal or external, it yet exhibits the utmost complexity and formal refinement in the general lines of its design. The plan is there, though only its skeleton is permanent, and wall-divisions are made movable for another reason than that which is causing them to vanish from our Western buildings. Moreover, the Japanese house is of one storey only, and if the open floor is likewise to establish itself for good in our own domestic architecture, it will probably be restricted with us also to the one-storey dwelling, to bungalow and town flat. But even in these the outer walls and windows will, of course, remain—at any rate until we acquire the hardy constitution of the Japanese, to whom a paper screen is sufficient protection in all weathers.

The breakdown of the principal architectural impulse is complete the moment the function of a building is expressed in an undifferentiated mass of cubic feet. It is at this moment that the second great movement, the movement which is to substitute a new external impulse for the old internal one, first becomes manifest. This movement springs, it will be recalled, from the threatened failure of our communications, a failure which is due, however, to no deficiency in these communications themselves, but to the vast and unequal overcrowding of modern cities. And the great increase of our populations that is the principal achievement of the nineteenth century presents three aspects, each one of which requires at this point to be carefully borne in mind.

First, the growth of population was not uniformly distributed, but went on far more swiftly in the great towns of Europe and America than it did throughout the countryside. Thus, while the population of England and Wales increased by about 90 per cent. between 1861 and 1921, the corresponding advance for London was about 133 per cent., while Berlin and New York went up by 500 and 600 per cent. respectively. The difference, however, is a diminishing one, having been far greater throughout the second half of the nineteenth century than it is to-day. Our English urban population, for example, grew during the decade 1870–1880 at a rate which was nearly 200 per cent. in excess of the rate of growth of the rural population. The first decade of the present century shows an excess in the urban rate over the rural of only 10 per cent.

Our second observation is this: that during the time when it was at its highest point, the rate of growth of the urban population rose too rapidly for the concomitant growth of building to keep pace with it. The result was that the growth of building fell into arrears, and that such arrears still in part remain to be made good to-day. As the inhabitants became more numerous so the shortage of houses became more acute, until at last an ugly and even dangerous congestion of human beings began everywhere to show itself. This congestion would never have existed if the rate of building had been equal to the rate of growth of the population; swift as it was, the rate of building could never become swift enough. A similar condition, though due to a different cause, prevailed after the great Fire of London, when Wren himself was driven to denounce the ill effects that flowed from “the mighty demand for the hasty works of thousands of houses at once.” Now, it is a commonplace that the growth of building may proceed in two directions, but it is not always realized that the two kinds of growth must proceed together, that each has its appointed function which the other is powerless to discharge. The growth of a town outward at its periphery is necessary, and the upward growth of its central region is also necessary. The first was the chief concern of the town-planning of yesterday and to-day, which unfortunately failed to carry out its appointed task. The second is likely to become the chief concern of the town-planning of the immediate future. Let us hope that it may be more fortunate.

These two growths are identical in one respect. Each of them remains, like all forms of growth known to science, entirely normal and beneficial so long as it is correctly regulated. We know that the growth of different parts of our body is regulated by means of chemical substances known as hormones, and that where certain hormones are lacking, or present in excess, we get the dwarf and the giant, goitre and cretinism. When it happens to the builders of a city that, in the happy phraseology of a seventeenth-century pamphlet, “the Magistrate has either no power or no care to make them build with any uniformity,” they at once become the agents of a growth that is just as abnormal, just as obnoxious, as these physiological ones. It would seem, as the nineteenth century has taught us, that the power of regulating architectural growth begins to fail when that growth exceeds a certain measure of speed and urgency. Clearly, as the rate of growth increases, so the regulating power must also increase if it is to retain an effective control over building, for if it fails to increase in a similar ratio its influence must come to an end. This is what has happened all too often. Nor, haphazard and ungracious as the growth of building has been throughout the whole of Western civilization, has it anywhere been more irregular than at those points where it has moved most swiftly, and where the demands of the expanding population have reached the utmost severity of pressure. We are often told that New York is a city of high buildings. It is nothing of the kind: it is a moderately low city disfigured by a few high buildings only. Not more than one building in every thousand in the Manhattan Island district, famous for its skyscrapers, exceeds twenty storeys in height. Nor should it be forgotten that the average height of buildings in New York is exactly the same as that obtaining in London, and rather less than the height of buildings in Paris. But while the upward growth of the two European cities has by no means been uniform and harmonious, it has not attained to the astonishing irregularity that receives such unmerited praise from English visitors to New York. It is the irregularity that is of consequence, and the source of this irregularity lies, on the one hand, in the sharp and unequally resisted strain put upon building by its effort to overtake the rate of increase of population, and, on the other, in the complete or partial breakdown of proper civic control, and the renunciation of the civic standard in building.

The third fact that has to be recorded in connection with the growth of our populations is a curious one. While the growth of building merely tended to become proportionate to the growth of the population, it was necessary that the means of communication should increase at a much faster rate. The more people there were, the more often and the more rapidly these people were compelled to move about from one place to another. Thus, while the inhabitants of Europe and America multiplied, let us say, like the interest gathering upon a fixed capital sum, the movement of these inhabitants, of their various belongings, their food and drink, the materials and products of their labour, the waste left over from their individual and corporate metabolism, all this movement grew in scope, volume and swiftness in the manner of compound interest, or like a snowball enlarging itself into an avalanche. It is impossible in these pages to examine this mysterious law in any detail, but an example of its working may perhaps be given. It was stated just now that during the sixty years 1861–1921 the population of England and Wales increased by about 90 per cent., or, roughly, from twenty millions to thirty-eight. Many figures might be quoted to illustrate the growth of communications during the same period, but those yielded by the Post Office, at whose enterprising hands this growth took origin, will be enough for our purpose. We find, then, that the annual postal revenue of this country had, in the year 1921, increased to forty-five millions from four millions in 1861, an advance of 1025 per cent. If this is the rate at which our communications must expand, no wonder the London traffic authorities complain that the more facilities they are able to provide, the greater becomes the demand made upon those facilities. Startling as the Post Office figures may seem, if we could as readily estimate the growth of the total movement along our roads, including not only pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but the transmission of water, fuel, and sewage, and of written and spoken messages as well, we should find the growth yet more considerable. Nor should we be surprised at the long, heroic struggle of nineteenth-century scientists and legislators to perfect this great and complicated thing, the modern road, or marvel to see them extend it hither and thither, and guard it from encroachments, and level and straighten out its trajectory, and search out a firm foundation for it, and render its surface hard and impervious, and dry it, clean it, illuminate it, and at last equip it for the automatic distribution of water and fuel, and for a continuous scavenging of all our towns.