There were few if any great leaders among twentieth-century traditional architects; certainly hardly more than one or two approached the calibre or the individual significance of the men whose work Part Three of this book has largely dealt with up to this point. But a conspectus can be provided, with typical examples of the best work in several countries, and some indication offered of the character of the production in other countries where the individual architects were less colourful, the monuments less notable, and the general level of quality less high.
CHAPTER 24
ARCHITECTURE CALLED TRADITIONAL
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Through at least the first three decades of the twentieth century most architects of the western world would have scorned the appellation ‘modern’ or, if they accepted it, would have defined the term very differently from the way it has been understood in the immediately preceding chapters. For twentieth-century architecture that continued the historicism[[511]] of the nineteenth century the usual name in English is ‘traditional’. This term reflects a fond presumption that such architecture derives its sanctions from the traditions of the further past, although in fact its only real tradition is that of the preceding hundred years. Whatever one calls it, this traditional architecture includes the majority of buildings designed before 1930 in most countries of the western world and a considerable, if very rapidly decreasing, proportion of those erected since.
Statements of this sort are not very relevant when they concern the arts. In the case of every revolutionary change in architecture the same situation has obtained while the old slowly gave way to the new. Since the modern revolution may well be of the scale of the Renaissance, the student of architectural history should recall that from the early crystallization of the new Italian mode—and at first it was no more than a minor regional mode—in Florence around 1420 to the general acceptance of a new international style throughout Europe some two hundred years passed. The Baroque, in succeeding the Renaissance, came to international dominion only by gradual stages and eventually died out, not all at once around 1750, but gradually over the next half century.
Despite prolific production and the quite remarkable things that were occasionally achieved when historicism came to uneasy terms with new technical means—as had already happened not infrequently in the nineteenth century—the traditional architecture of the twentieth century is primarily an instance of survival; and cultural survivals are among the most difficult problems with which history has to deal. Their sluggish life, sunk in inertia and conservatism, is very different from the vitality of new developments. Yet survivals are tough and resilient, tending always to maintain themselves by their very uneventfulness. Static, not to say smug, assurance is their greatest strength; their greatest danger is that boredom resulting from excessive familiarity which they eventually induce.
Survivals do not generally rouse the interest of posterity. The Gothic of fifteenth-century Italy or that of seventeenth-century England has not received from historians the attention of the rising forces in the architecture of those periods. Somewhat unfairly, late and anachronistic achievements, if admired at all, are likely to be credited to the previous age. In America, for example, Grecian plantation houses built as late as the 1850s are frequently called ‘Southern Colonial’. We are too well aware today, however, that the work of the traditional architects of the last fifty or sixty years is of this century, and not of the previous one, to permit that kind of confusion. The historian must attempt to give some sort of account of things like the Stockholm City Hall (Plate [174A] and [B]) and the Woolworth Building (Plate [178]). But the story is not an easy one to tell because it seemed—still at least in the mid twentieth century—to lack plot. The rise of modern architecture, on the other hand, offers material for a dramatic narrative, for it follows the pattern of the ‘success-story’, just as does that of the Gothic in twelfth-century France or the beginnings of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy.
In some areas of the world a meaningful succession of stages can be discerned in the late period of historicism. Because of the differential lags in various parts of the western world, however, it is difficult to find a scheme of organization that is at all generally applicable. All the same, those lags usually mean that certain countries were going through phases of architectural development in the early twentieth century that more advanced areas had left behind before 1900. Since those phases have been discussed in Part Two, it is unnecessary to detail here the peripheral and anachronistic ‘repeats’ of familiar late nineteenth-century episodes in the present century.
Without attempting to round out the picture with the citation of multiple examples, one may at this point suggest some of the aspects, parallel and successive, of twentieth-century historicism. There was, for example, a characteristic continuation of that reaction against the boldness and coarseness of the architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century which is recognizable in most countries, and particularly perhaps in America and England from the eighties; hence the general critical emphasis of the period on ‘restraint’ and on the ‘tasteful’. Academically designed buildings of the 1920s were often still intended to realize aspirations that had been novel some forty years earlier; rarely, however, did they do so with a vitality comparable to that of later nineteenth-century work. So also Gothic of the early twentieth century produced by such American architects as Ralph Adams Cram or James Gamble Rogers hardly differs in its standards from what the English Bodley initiated around 1870.
We have already seen in much of the work of Perret and Behrens a special kind of continuation of the Classical tradition in the twentieth century. This shades down through various degrees and kinds of simplification as represented in the personal modes of such architects as Asplund in Sweden or Marcello Piacentini in Italy to the maintenance of a Classical revivalism as absolute as that of 1800 in white marble temples like Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial in Washington (Plate [180]).