A building erected under the zoning ordinance will, therefore, occupy as much ground as its promoter is able to buy with borrowed money, and will, wherever possible, spread itself over the entire area of a city block, so that it is bounded by a street on all four sides. Its outline will, in addition, present two striking characteristics. It will rise on all sides in a succession of receding stages gathered at the summit in a central tower-like mass which, provided its area does not exceed a prescribed limit, may itself escape the restraining influence and rise unhindered. And while at each corner the street wall itself is brought to the full height permissible under the ordinance, the central part of each façade will be recessed so as to form one or several open courts or areas. At the moment of writing, London is about to witness the completion of its first building designed along these lines. Why the American zoning regulations should have been made to govern the design of the new Devonshire House building in London is not excessively clear, but this interesting piece of work does at any rate provide a valuable illustration of the laws of growth to which American architecture will in future be subject. For this reason it is by far the most interesting and the most characteristically modern of our large new buildings. There is just now a curious tendency to describe as modern a small number of structures whose windows are treated in accordance with a short-lived æsthetic fashion of thirty years ago. Devonshire House furnishes proof that architecture is able to be more modern than that, for here the new zoning ordinance is, for the first time in London, shown actively at work.
A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)
We may now see why it was remarked that zoning had substituted a new architectural impulse for the governing impulse of internal form to which we owe the major masterpieces of architecture. A zoned building can never be a masterpiece in the same sense as these. You cannot compare a zoned building to Chartres Cathedral, any more than you can compare a suit of clothes to a paper-weight. The form of the one is dictated by something working from inside outwards, while the form of the other is the result of an agency working upon the surface from without. The paper-weight may be as beautiful in its way, but its beauty does not arise, as the beauty of clothing arises, from its power to invest the human form with an apt, expressive and dignified integument. In the same manner the zoned building may be beautiful, but not with the beauty of the greatest architecture, which consists in the fashioning of a dwelling-place, human or divine, in such a manner as to guard and delight those who enter into it. The zoned building is, I repeat, like the University of Pittsburg, a matter of cubic feet piled up around a private road. Any new formal impulse that may control its growth resides in the street without; any new formal excellence it may exhibit has for its origin the directing authority of this street. But in spite of the inferior quality of its products, it is easy to see that the zoning ordinance holds out a considerable promise to the architecture of the future, supplying a fresh and vigorous motive in the place of an older that is rapidly failing, and setting up the authority of reason where caprice alone now rules.
Before we leave this subject, a word may perhaps be added concerning the limitations of this method of control. It clearly cannot be applied everywhere with equally pleasing results. A town or a district in which the streets run at right angles to one another will show it at its best, for there, and there only, will it be possible for the defining lines to meet with any degree of regularity. London buildings, too, have sometimes to conform to a stipulated angle, though for another reason than those of New York. But the irregularity of our streets, and the narrowness of most of our building frontages, have caused these controlling angles to become a source of grotesque heterogeneity and ugliness instead of allowing them to establish a new kind of order. Nor should our town be one containing sites excessively large, or have some of its streets so narrowly spaced as to produce sites that are sensibly smaller than the average. The larger area will permit of too great a building height, the smaller of too little, and it would appear necessary that the “street block” should, in addition to a regular outline, observe an approximate equality of size also. Founded upon these two equalities, the zoning ordinances proceed to build up an equality of height, of content, which in its turn begets yet another that is the guarantee of their ultimate success. For nothing will prosper in America that does not pay, and fortunately zoning has been found to pay, and to pay very handsomely. The “realtors” of the big American towns did not take long to discover that, while the building of a skyscraper must enhance the value of the surrounding land, this enhancement is considerably greater where the growth is controlled than where it is left free to congest, and stifle, and darken, as in the licence of nineteenth-century New York. To the neighbouring landowner an unregulated skyscraper, if it pointed to a new opportunity, was at the same time an evil and a discouragement, for, if all buildings simultaneously went up to those same heights, would they not mutually destroy one another? The zoning ordinance has thus become a part of the republican policy of the United States, under which a competitive society is made to bring forth numbers rather than eminence, and watches over these its children with democratic solicitude.
We have examined with some care the evolution of wheeled traffic and the changes its multiplication must inevitably bring about in the appearance of our streets. Is not flying, it may be asked, always described as the locomotion of the future, and is not the shape of our buildings likely to reflect so important a development? The first part of this question would take us beyond the scope of the present essay, but the answer to the second part may perhaps form the subject of a digressive paragraph. One might reasonably say that the design of a building is likely to respond to the needs of aerial traffic in three ways only, but not in any way that is likely to be of great consequence. The first possibility is that a building may be required providing means whereby aeroplanes are enabled to make a safe landing on its roof. A flat roof of ample dimensions thus becomes necessary, and yet we have seen that one of the effects of the zoning ordinance is to break up the roof surface of a building into a series of narrow ledges. A building upon the top of which it is desired to bring an aeroplane to land will, therefore, in those places where zoning prevails, need to be conspicuously low. Possibly a roof may here and there be projected outward beyond the walls of a building, an expedient whose drawbacks are such that it is unlikely to be often adopted. In any case it will be necessary to provide an entrance to the building from this roof, but there is nothing very new about that. The second possibility is that the aeroplane may have to be lowered from the roof of the building to the street level. The easiest way of making this descent is (to quote from a newspaper advertisement of the great Wanamaker exhibition to which I have referred) by “corkscrewing down the exterior of the building.” One of the great mural cartoons included (side by side with a Ford “family aeroplane”) in this exhibition shows an enormous cylindrical tower, encircled by a descending spiral, very much like a corkscrew in appearance. This tower is not, however, an ordinary city building, but, reaching high above the concourse of these, a special structure surmounted by a mooring mast for dirigibles. Happily the building has yet to be designed that will, while giving shelter, however unworthy, to human beings, wrap itself in a broad fire-escape for the convenience of corkscrewing aeroplanes. And there is, on the whole, no ground for supposing that our urban architecture will at any time pay so exorbitant a regard to the advance of the aeroplane as to transform itself in this manner.
But it will be remarked that aerial travel is bound to call into being a number of buildings of a special kind, devoted to this one purpose alone. May we expect such buildings to be as novel and as eminently characteristic as the Wanamaker cartoon would appear to suggest? It is difficult to believe that among them there will be anything more unusual than the dirigible hangar, which is already a familiar sight, and which, to do it justice, has a peculiar interest in that it is the only modern building whose purpose contains an unanswerable argument for a roof vaulted throughout its entire breadth. The hangar built at Orly by the French engineer Freyssinet is perhaps the example best known in this country; if it is not, it certainly deserves to be. But though the rounded shape of a balloon clearly demands a vaulted roof, there is no reason why such roofs should not be used elsewhere, as they have in fact been used for many centuries; and in his Utrecht Post Office the Dutch architect Crouwel has given us a building that, stripped of its great clock and its counters and other furnishings, might easily be mistaken by a wandering dirigible for its accustomed lair. Striking though the appearance of the Orly hangar may be found, it would scarcely be fair to attribute its success to the peculiar function it so efficiently discharges. And if this is all that the dirigible balloon is likely to do for architecture, what shall we say of the aeroplane? It would appear that only when practising the movement described by our American friends as “corkscrewing” will the aeroplane need the help of the architectural innovator. Till then we must remain content to see it inhabit a structure hardly distinguishable from the coach-house of our forbears.